Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger

by Lee Smith

  She can tell, or not tell. She can tell it now, or later. Or not at all. Never. But actually she doesn’t know if she’s capable of not telling it, of keeping such a big secret. She’s still so mad. She can’t eat a bite. She looks over at Willie, who’s almost finished already.

  Suddenly he stands up. “This is big, isn’t it, baby? This is as big as it gets. Come on.” He pulls out her chair.

  “What? Where do you think we’re going? I haven’t even done the dishes, you know. They’ll be back before long.”

  “No they won’t,” he says. “And even if they are, so what? Come on. It’s a full moon out there. Let’s take a drive down the beach like we used to.”

  “Right now?”

  “Right now.” He’s got her by the shoulders, he’s hustling her along.

  “I . . . I can’t,” she says, meaning,I can’t do this, any of it, any longer. The truth is what you get with Roxy, she’s so reliable, you can count on her.

  But he’s breathing into her hair.

  “Why not?” he asks.

  “I . . . I . . .”

  Willie draws back. He stops pushing her. He’s waiting. Elvis’s legs swing back and forth, back and forth. Down at the end of Lonely Street, it’s Heartbreak Hotel and I’m so lonely baby, I’m just so lonely I could die. The hands of the clock move to nine.

  “I’ve got to get a sweater.” Roxy darts into the bedroom and opens the closet door and pushes the tackle box back where it belongs, back into the back of the closet, and piles an old quilt and some outgrown jackets and coats on top for good measure. There now! Archaeology. Nobody will ever know the tackle box is back there, and Roxy will never read those letters again. She feels her secret blooming like a great red rose inside her — a metaphor! Or, her secret is blooming like a great red roseinside the garden of her body, an extended metaphor, a beautiful image seen by no one. Known by no one except herself. Suddenly Roxy is damn proud of keeping this secret, of not hurting Willie, her soul mate, her old true love.

  “Roxy, get a move on! What are you doing in there?” he’s yelling out in the hall.

  “Just hold your horses!” she yells back, because she’s his equal now, isn’t she? Finally, after all these years. She thinks of herself and Frances on that seesaw Daddy made when lightning split the old poplar — two little sisters always teetering, but perfectly balanced. Another metaphor. She remembers Frances’s red wool coat and her flyaway dark curls in the April wind.

  “Roxy, goddamnit! Come on!”

  “Coming!” Roxy throws on her aqua scarf and grabs up the faux fur jacket she bought in Nashville. Outside it’s a big full moon but a windy night. Cold. Thank God he’s got the top up for once. She jumps in the convertible and Willie guns it down the driveway throwing sand everywhere. The seashell road stretches out white in the moonlight past all the dark houses ahead. The road is a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor. This is a poem from high school, when Roxy was Miss Rose Hill and potato salad queen. May the road rise to meet you. This is an old Irish toast that Willie taught her. Willie is Irish. But Roxy is nothing but Roxy, squealing as he accelerates, just like she used to do on the Ferris wheel, way up high. Then the houses are gone and they’re flying out toward the point past scrub pines and beach grass and sandy hills briefly illumined then lost in darkness as the land falls away behind them on either side. When they get to the little park at the end, Willie slows down enough to drive across the parking lot, right past all the posted and stop signs then out between the dunes and onto the beach itself.

  Surely they’ll be arrested.

  Luckily it’s low tide.

  The moon is as bright as a headlight making a path across the water straight to them, it reminds Roxy of that locomotive at the Bambi Lynn Motel, its headlight bearing down upon such scenes, good Lord, some of them against the law. Suddenly Willie switches off the lights and now there’s nothing but moonlight everywhere, the moon lies fair upon the straits, the wide beach rising to meet them like a ribbon of moonlight itself until suddenly it’s all obscured by a bank of clouds. Now Roxy can’t see a thing. It’s black as pitch, dark as a dungeon, dark as a mine. Roxy can’t see the water, she can’t see the sand or the dunes beyond. If they die out here, that’ll ruin Lilah’s big wedding for sure. Plus it would be so stupid. She grabs his jacket, then his arm.

  “Now Stevie,” she says sternly. “You watch where you’re going, honey. It’s a mighty big ocean over there.”

  “Shut up, Mama,” Stevie hollers. “You just stick with me,” as they keep on driving down the beach into the windy dark.

  Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger

  It was cocktail time. The sun, which had been in and out all day, now found a crack in the piles of gray cloud and shone brilliantly, falsely, down the length of the beach, even though thunder rolled on in the distance. The ocean was full of whitecaps. Its color went from a mean gray, far out near the horizon under those clouds, to steely blue patches closer in where the sun hit it. The tide was coming in, running about a foot higher than usual, eating up the beach, bunching the people on the beach closer and closer together. It was unreliable, irritating weather, unusual for August. A strong wind had come up after the most recent shower, blowing straight in from the ocean over the waves. This wind was perfect for kites and kites had sprung up everywhere, flown mostly by grandchildren who tangled their strings or let them get caught on TV antennas and then had to have another one, immediately, from El’s Hardware Store on the mainland. It was this day, August 25, nearing sunset, cocktail time in kite weather, when Mrs. Darcy received her first vision.

  Below the house, Mrs. Darcy’s daughters had arranged themselves together on the beach. Tall, graceful women like flowers, they leaned delicately toward one another and sipped their gin and tonics and shouted into the wind. Their family resemblance was noticeable, if not particularly striking: the narrow forehead, the high cheekbones, the dark eyes set a fraction of an inch too close together: the long straight nose, rather imperious, aristocratic, and prone to sinus. They were good-looking women.

  Yet try as she might — and she had tried, all their years of growing up — Mrs. Darcy was unable to find anything of herself in them. Mrs. Darcy was short, blonde, and overweight, with folds of flesh that dangled like dewlaps from her upper arms. She had been a pretty girl once, but she had never been a thin girl, or a fashionable girl, or a fashionable young woman. These girls took after their father; they had his long, thin hands. Inside the house, Mrs. Darcy leafed through the pile of craft books that Trixie had brought her, and looked down at her daughters on the beach. Craft books! Mrs. Darcy thought. Craft books. What does she know? Wrapping her robe about her, Mrs. Darcy moved to stand at the door.

  “WHAT WAS SHE DOING when you came out?” Trixie asked. Trixie was the oldest, with three teenagers of her own. Her close-cut hair was streaked with gray, and her horn-rimmed glasses sat squarely on her nose. “What was she doing?” Trixie asked again, over the wind.

  Maria, the middle sister, shifted her position on the quilt. “Not much, I think. Puttering around the kitchen.”

  “Well, there’s nothing to do for supper,” Trixie pointed out. “It’s already done.”

  “I don’t know,” said Maria, who always deliberated, or gave the impression of deliberating, before she spoke. “I think some of the children had come in and gotten a drink or something.”

  “I tried to get her to help cook,” Trixie said. “Remember how she used to cook?”

  “You know what really drove me mad?” Ginny said suddenly. “I was telling my shrink this the other day. I mean, whenever I think of Mama, you know what I think of her doing? I think of her putting leftovers in a smaller container. Like, say, we’ve had a roast, right? And if it were me, I’d leave the roast in the pan it was in. But oh no. After dinner, she had to find a smaller pan, right? For the refrigerator. Tupperware or something. The Tupperware post-roast container. Then somebody makes a sandwich maybe, and one inch of the roast is gone
, so she had to find another container. Then another, then another, then another. She must have gone through about fifteen containers for every major thing she fixed. That’s all I can remember of childhood.” Ginny had been leaning forward intensely, sucking on a Winston in the wind. Now she stabbed the cigarette out in the sand and flung herself back flat and her long black hair fanned out on the quilt.

  “You’re feeling very angry about this,” Maria said in her precise, well-modulated voice. Maria was a psychologist, married to another psychologist, Mark, who sat some thirty yards behind the sisters on the deck at the back of the house, observing things through his binoculars. “Your anger seems oddly out of proportion to the event,” Maria remarked.

  “No kidding,” Ginny said.

  One of Maria’s children, Andrew, came up to get his shoe tied. “Why can’t we buy any firecrackers?” he wailed, and then ran off, a blur of blue jean legs, without waiting for the answer.

  “Now, then,” Trixie said. The wind had died down, it was possible to talk, and Trixie liked to get right to the heart of the matter. “It does seem to me, as I wrote to both of you, that a certain amount of, er, aimlessness is understandable under the circumstances. But as I said before, when I went to Raleigh last month, I just couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe the way she was living. Dust on everything, and you know how she always was about dust. She was drinking Coca-Colas. Hawaiian Punch. Frozen pizza in the refrigerator — pizza, can you imagine?”

  Maria smiled at the idea of pizza, the mere mention of it so incongruous with their childhood dinners in Raleigh. She remembered the long shining expanse of mahogany, the silver, the peacocks on the wallpaper, the crimson-flowered Oriental rug. “Pizza!” Maria said softly. “Pop would have died.”

  “He did,” Ginny pointed out.

  “Really!” Trixie said.

  “I think there has to be a natural period of mourning,” Maria said, not meaning to lecture. “It’s absolutely essential in the cycle of regeneration.”

  “But it’s not mourning, exactly,” Trixie said. “It’s just being not interested. Not interested in anything, that’s the only way I can describe it. Lack of interest in life.”

  “I can understand that,” Ginny said.

  “That could be a form of mourning,” Maria said. “No two people mourn alike, of course.”

  “Different strokes for different folks,” Ginny said. They ignored her.

  “But you know how she used to keep herself so busy all the time,” Trixie said. “She always had some craft project going, always. She was always doing volunteer work, playing bridge, you know how she was.”

  “She wore spectator heels and stockings every day,” Ginny said in a passing-judgment tone.

  “Yes, well, that’s what I mean,” Trixie went on. “And now what is she wearing? Rubber flip-flops from Kmart. She’s let Lorene go, too. Lorene only comes in once a week now and does the bathrooms and the floors.”

  “I can’t imagine that house without Lorene,” Maria said. Lorene had been a central figure in their girlhood, skinny as Olive Oyl in her starched white uniform.

  “Well, Lorene is just as worried about Mama as she can be,” Trixie said. “As you might well imagine. I went over to see her in the projects and gave her some money and I wrote down my number for her, at home, and told her to call me up any time. Any time she goes over there to clean and anything worries her.”

  “That’s a good idea, Trixie,” Maria said.

  “Well,” Trixie said. Trixie saw her two daughters, tan, leggy Richmond girls, far down the beach, walking toward them in the foaming line of surf. “I’ll tell you what I told Mother,” Trixie continued. “I said, ‘Why don’t you start going to church again? Why don’t you join one of these retirement clubs in town? They have all sorts of them now, you wouldn’t believe it. They go to the mountains and they go to New York to see plays and everything is all arranged for them ahead of time. Why, we saw a group of them at Disney World in Florida, having a perfectly wonderful time!’ “

  “I can’t see that,” Ginny said.

  “Of course you can’t, you’re twenty-seven years old,” Trixie snapped. Sometimes she felt as though Ginny were her daughter instead of her sister.

  “Still, she did show some interest in coming down here,” Maria pointed out. “Surely that’s something.”

  “Interest but no initiative,” Trixie said. “I suggested it, I picked her up.”

  “Aren’t you something?” Ginny said.

  “Ginny, I realize that you’re going through a difficult period of adjustment yourself, but that is no excuse, no excuse at all for childish behavior. I think we have to start thinking in terms of a nursing home, is what I think. Caswell agrees, incidentally. Of course that would involve selling the Raleigh house: it would all be quite complicated. But I do see that as a distinct possibility.”

  “There’s Margaret, why don’t you ask her what she thinks?” Maria said. “She came over to see Mama this morning.”

  “When?” Trixie asked sharply.

  “Oh, about ten o’clock. You were at the Hammock Shop, I think.”

  “Gotcha!” Ginny said.

  MARGARET DALE WHITTED, who had divorced one husband and buried two, made her slow majestic way across the sand. A white caftan billowed about her and she carried a martini balanced carefully in one hand. “Cheers!” Margaret said when she reached them, steadying herself with a hand on Trixie’s shoulder. “My God, dears, it’s not worth it, is it? Nature, I mean.” Margaret’s voice was raspy and decisive, the voice of someone who has always had money. She had known their mother for forty summers more or less, since the time when Lolly and Pop had built their house, the Lollipop, next to Margaret’s Sand Castle. There had been nothing, almost nothing, on the south end of the island then. They had been pioneers.

  “Margaret, how are you?” Ginny asked. Ginny had always liked Margaret.

  “Oh, there’s some life in the old girl yet.” Margaret gave her famous wink. “I’m having some trouble, though, just between us girls, with this shoulder. I fell, you know, in March.”

  They didn’t know.

  Margaret sipped her martini and stared out to sea, breathing heavily. Ginny stood up and dusted the sand off her jeans. Margaret’s gold medallion winked in the fitful sun.

  “We wanted to ask you about Mama. What you think, I mean,” Trixie said. Trixie noticed how her own daughters had seated themselves just far enough away so that no one could connect them with her at all.

  “Mama, Mama, it’s all tangled up,” wailed Christy, Maria’s six-year-old daughter.

  “Take it to Daddy,” Maria said. “He’ll have to cut some string.”

  Trixie and Maria stood up.

  “Well,” Margaret rasped. “I’ll tell you what, girls. It’s hell to get old.” Margaret laughed and steadied herself on Trixie’s elbow. The wind blew Margaret’s huge white skirt about their legs, entwining them. Suddenly Ginny dashed off after a Frisbee, got it, and threw it back to Bill, Trixie’s son. Maria picked up the quilt, shook it, and walked back up toward the Lollipop, the deck, her husband. Through the binoculars, he stared toward the ocean, his red beard curled around his pipe. The screen door of the Lollipop opened and Mrs. Darcy came slowly out, blinking in the sun.

  Down on the beach, Margaret raised her silver cup aloft, “Cheers, honey,” she said to Trixie.

  “Look, Mama, look!” Christy and Andrew started up a howl. “Look, Mama, a rainbow, a rainbow!”

  Maria nodded to them, with exaggerated gestures, from the deck.

  “How’s it going, honey?” Mark asked without lowering the binoculars. “Getting everything worked out?”

  “Oh, it’s just so difficult.” Maria put the quilt over the rail and sat down in a chair. “Ginny is so difficult, for one thing. I hate these whole-family things, I always have. There are so many things to work through. So many layers of meaning to sort out.”

  “Actually, there’s a great deal to be said for
the nuclear family structure,” said Mark, focusing his binoculars on the sight he had been viewing for some time now, Ginny’s breasts moving beneath her pink T-shirt as she played Frisbee with his nephew.

  But Ginny stopped playing Frisbee then and turned to stare out at the ocean and Bill did too, as all movement stopped along the beach.

  “Mama, Mama, Mama!” Christy screamed.

  “I’ll be damned,” Mark said, putting the binoculars down. “A double rainbow.” Mark put an arm around his wife and they stood together on the deck, nuclear and whole, like a piece of architecture against the wind.

  “All the summers we’ve been here, I’ve never seen one of those,” Trixie remarked to Margaret.

  A giant rainbow shimmered above the horizon, pink and blue and yellow and blue again, above the mass of clouds, and as they all watched, the clouds parted and a second rainbow — almost iridescent at first, the merest hint of color — arced across the sky beneath the first, spreading color until the rainbows seemed to fill the sky. The children on the beach, caught in motion as definitely as if they had been playing Statues, broke up with a whoop and began to cavort madly, whirling around and around in all directions. Sand and Frisbees flew. Up on the porch, behind Maria and her son-in-law, Mrs. Darcy moved hesitantly at first, in an oddly sidewise, crablike fashion, farther out into the afternoon. Mrs. Darcy wore her flip-flops and a flowered housecoat. She raised her arms suddenly, stretching them up and out toward the rainbows. “Ai-yi-yi!” she wailed loudly. “Yi-yi-yi!” Mrs. Darcy stood trans-fixed then fell forward into the sandy deck in a dead faint.

  THE NEXT MORNING DAWNED clear and beautiful. The joggers were at it early, pounding the road from one end of the island to the other. Fishermen lined the bridge over the sound to the mainland, dropping their lines straight down into the outgoing tide. Marsh grass waved in the wind and strange South Carolina birds flew overhead. Somebody caught a blowfish. Along the road beside the biggest houses, white-uniformed maids came out to dump the bottles and trash from the night before, getting their houses ready for the next day, lingering to gossip in the sun. Children ran out onto the piers that protruded far into the marsh, checking crab traps, squealing at the catch.