by Brad Barkley
She packed everything out of her chest of drawers (from a Maryland estate sale, she remembered), and half of what hung in the wardrobe. Her suitcase bulged, though they would be gone only the weekend. She remembered the Motel 6 on the highway. John Shire had seen it on the way in. In the back seat of the Olds she had leaned into his wide, leathery hands pressed to her spine, her right thigh spread across the upholstery where his own left leg should have been. He’d worked her body, the parts of her, much as she imagined him working the ropes and levers in his car, and she gave in to it, left herself to the memory of her skin, to her own near-forgotten ability to draw heat from a man. And as easily as he manipulated his car, John Shire brought her over familiar but neglected ground to a place where she knew she wanted to stay.
“One weekend,” he’d told her. “Clean sheets, maid service. Queen-size bed, beer in the bathtub.”
“You’re forgetting your little girl. We can’t just leave her.”
“I ain’t forgetting. Uncle King won’t mind baby-sitting a couple nights.”
She had not, for some reason, thought of King till then. But what would he do when she came back on Monday? Nothing, just as he would do nothing now to stop her leaving. Impotence was like cancer—unchecked, it spread. King oozed it, and on Monday she could walk in the kitchen and poach eggs, hand King his buttermilk and remind him to wear his hat. If she had to explain, she would tell him the weekend had been a break in the dull movie of their lives, like when the projectionist forgets to change the reel and for a moment the screen flares white. He could say nothing, though, knowing as she did that she should be gone, away from him and this place he’d brought her to, where she felt her life, like everything around them, given over to dust, awaiting slow burial.
She brought her bag downstairs and out the door, tossed it in the back of John Shire’s car. Then she sat on the hood of the Nova to wait, leaned her head on the windshield. Overhead, the moon shone at the phase she could never remember the name for, full but for a thin edge broken off, damaging the perfect circle.
Through his bedroom window King watched her, her rust hair spread across the windshield of the Nova. He had awakened hearing the dry whisper of clothes swept from the closet in the adjoining room—her bedroom—and pushed into a bag. Now she waited. King walked down to her, past Rose asleep on the cot in the front room.
“King, dammit, I’m going off for the weekend. I got to get away from here for a while.”
“You aren’t coming back,” he told her, meaning, simply, that she wouldn’t.
“Don’t forget I own half this place, my name’s on the deed.” In the moonlight the colors of her clothes vanished, and she was rendered in black and white. King squinted to see her this way. The screen door slammed behind them, and John Shire hobbled toward them, the orange tip of his cigarette bobbing, boot scraping the asphalt.
“John says for you to watch after the kid till we get back.” Rose. Until that moment King had forgotten her, asleep in the front room, beneath the open window. In a minute, Red would take off with John Shire, and Rose would awaken to the ragged, broken roar of the car’s ruined exhaust. She would awaken and look out and have to see that—her father pulling away, leaving her. King trotted toward the house, the coins in his pockets ringing, and cut his path to bump John Shire with his shoulder. He wanted to knock him down, delay their departure, but instead caromed off the hard angles of the man. Shire raised his crutches and shifted to keep his balance. Inside, King shook Rose awake.
“Honey, get up, please.” Outside, John Shire and Red leaned in toward one another; King followed the glint of her wedding band, her left hand on the car door handle.
“What’s wrong?” Rose asked, her voice thick with sleep.
“Nothing, sweetie, we’re going to watch a movie.”
“Will you tell me a movie?” The car door swung open, and the interior light cut the dark.
“Yes, I’ll tell you one. Let’s hurry.” He took her hand and guided her through the kitchen, up the back stairs to the projection booth. The booth was soundless, and King realized the noise of the exhaust would still reach them with nothing to drown it out. He yanked away the tarp and clicked on the projector. The motor whirred, belts squeaked, and beneath the noise of it King heard the grumble of exhaust. For sound he clapped his hands. Rose looked at him, sleepy-eyed.
“How ‘bout we watch one?” he said. “See it on the big screen?” She grinned and nodded, clapped with him. He heard the engine grind climb and fall, but he was listening for it, she was not. The thought reassured him. He told her to pick out one from the stack of reel canisters in the corner. As he spoke, he could make out the crunch of tires on the gravel at the end of the lot.
John Shire steered onto the road, working the levers and ropes that controlled the car. Red let her hand rest on his leg, teasing the inside of his thigh. The mis-pointed beams of the car illuminated part of the road, the tops of trees off to the side.
Rose handed King the second reel of Swiss Family Robinson. He fired the projector lamp and aligned it with the screen; a truncated cone of dust floated over the lot, over his Olds still parked and tethered by the curly wire to the speaker post. Rose stood on tiptoe, watching. “Here we go,” King said to her.
The Nova turned off the dirt road in a moonlit billow of dust, the taste of which Red had already forgotten. John Shire manipulated the ropes and steering wheel, guiding her to something new. Her mind could be no more specific than that; new, she thought, is good enough. They entered the twisted part of the state road, her eyes following the slice of it lit by their headlights, the car moving swiftly through the curves. Away, she thought, New.
The gears and belts of the projector clicked and hummed, the perforated edge of the thirty-five-millimeter celluloid fed into the machine as King and Rose followed its path. They watched the shiny tag of film as it worked its way through, obeying the twist and turn of gears that would guide it out the other side where it could be loaded onto the bottom reel, primed then to give them a story—something mindless and happy they both waited to see.
EAT
MY father sat on one of the green revolving stools, stopwatch in hand. The cardboard sign on the door of our Tast-T-Cup Diner, flipped to CLOSED, split the sunlight streaming in. It was Sunday. My mother stood at her spot beside the small, gray cash register, behind the glass case displaying Beechnut packs and cigars, souvenir thimbles and plastic pocket combs. Spatula in hand, bound in a fresh apron, I waited at the grill.
“Ordering,” my father said. “Two hard-fried, browns, wheat sliced, side-a-strips torch ‘em, short stack and grits. Go.” He clicked the watch. I cracked two eggs in one hand and let them plop on the grill, pushed bread in the toaster, threw diced potatoes and bacon behind the eggs, dolloped three puddles of batter the size of saucers and turned them when they bubbled. The bacon made a sound like rain. Toast popped up and I pushed it down again, wet my brush with melted butter as I flipped the eggs, turned the bacon, stirred the pot of grits, shuffled the hash browns. Grease spatters stung the backs of my hands as sweat ran down my forearms and hissed away on the grill. I reminded myself of the man on Ed Sullivan, spinning plates on sticks, not letting any fall. Everything smelled done at once and came together on two blue-edged plates I slid under my father’s nose. He clicked the watch and looked at it.
“It don’t beat your old man’s best,” he said, “but damn good enough.” My mother smiled.
Today my father lives in Seven Springs Village, which the brochure termed a permanent recuperative facility—a nursing home. We had to send him there following his stroke, a year after my mother passed away. Every Christmas, Jackie and I strap Danny and Lisa in the car to make the trip back to North Carolina. Along the way, I find the places I like to stop for food: Jan’s House, Chick and Ruth’s, 421 Motor Lodge, and a corrugated tin place near Dover simply named EAT. Jackie, a distance runner when she’s not teaching, will order nothing but salad for herself, and plain oatmeal for Li
sa (Danny, eight months old, is still nursing). She tells me the place named EAT should be renamed CHOLESTEROL. I tell her it is not the food I go for, though the food is wonderful—chicken-fried steak, green beans from the can, lemon meringue pie with an ocean of egg whites up top.
I go to these places because when I walk through the door I can smell my father’s Dutch Masters Perfectos and Old Spice mixed in the grease and coffee. Now, at Christmas, the windows of the diners carry twinkling strands of colored lights behind the fogged glass; fake-snow aerosol spray spells out “Merry Xmas” across the door. I remember spraying those words myself, T-shirt held over my nose against the fumes. We sit in the vinyl booths, and I do fork and toothpick tricks for Lisa, feed quarters to the tableside jukebox. Jackie eats her salad and steals bites of my pie, lets me stay and linger over bottomless cups of bitter black coffee.
My father tucked the stopwatch in his shirt pocket, drew out a cigar, jammed it in his mouth. He scraped food from the plates onto the cement outside the back door, where stray dogs came to eat the scraps he left out.
“Now,” he said. “What do you say to the egg man?”
“Stack ‘em, don’t crack ‘em.”
“Good. The bread man?”
“Fresh stuff, off the bottom. No day-old.”
“Right-o. Sandy will work the register. She’ll be here to help if you get stuck on anything.” Sandy was a copper-haired waitress with wiry, muscled arms, deep wrinkles, and black horn-rimmed glasses.
My father pointed his cigar at me. “And if Joe Whelan comes around?”
I gathered up my apron to wipe my hands, a movement learned from watching my father. “Don’t serve him any food,” I said.
“That ain’t all.” My father drew a kitchen match from behind his ear, sparked it across his pant leg, sucked fire into the cigar. The smoke stung my nostrils. “The other thing is, throw him out on his sorry ass.”
My mother slapped his wrist with a dish towel and told him to watch his mouth. “Just mind the list, honey, and you’ll do fine,” she said to me.
The list had been made up by my father, scrawled in grease pencil on a piece of shirt cardboard and taped to the side of the cash register:
1. Shirt and Shoes Required.
2. No Money Left Overnight.
3. No Bad Checks.
4. No Biker Jackets.
5. No Transients.
6. No Profanity.
7. We Reserve the Right to Refuse Service to Anyone.
I read over the faded words as if they were the Ten Commandments. Beside the No Profanity rule, someone—Ray Wilson most likely—had written in “this means you, you sonofabitch.”
They were leaving on a food-buying trip, to Winston for cured hams, up along the Blue Ridge Parkway for honeycomb, apples, molasses, and the corn husk dolls my mother displayed under the glass counter. My father made the trip every year, on a Saturday, but this time they had decided to go together and stay for a week. I had turned fourteen, old enough to mind the store while they took a vacation. My father wrote a note to get me out of school.
They left on a Wednesday, during the afternoon lull. My father loaded the station wagon with their bags strapped to the top (to leave room inside for the hams). Up to the last minute, he gave me instructions on what to do in the event of holdups or hippies or broken pipes. While the engine idled, he drew me aside and put his arm across my shoulder. I stared at the black hairs on his forearm, the dark green anchor tattooed there.
“Napkin dispensers, Jess,” he said, and lightly shook me. “Don’t forget.” He had drummed into me his theory that the quality of a diner could be determined from its napkin dispensers. His dispensers—always full—ran a tight, gleaming line down the counter, like a row of chrome fence posts.
My mother, wearing her white gloves and beaded hat, kissed me. My father shook hands, told me to stay out of his liquor drawer, and honked the horn as they drove off in a stream of white gravel dust.
We lived in a neighborhood of look-alike houses on a narrow blacktop that ran perpendicular to Main Street, less than half a mile from the diner. My father had a talent for imagining disasters—floods, break-ins, gas explosions—and did not want to live far from the Tast-T-Cup. The morning after they left I awoke at four, walked under stars to the diner and cooked my own breakfast, unlocked the door for Sandy at quarter till, flipped the door sign to OPEN at five on the dot. The Westin’s Feed Store group arrived first, a circle of grizzled old men in caps who spent their days tracing a path from the feed store to the diner, planning hunting trips they never took, inventing lies for one another. They swallowed plates of grits and scrapple and poached eggs with hash. I kept up with their orders while the Bun-O-Matic gurgled coffee smells beside me. The feed store group, led by Ray Wilson, had their jokes over me—“Look, Teddy Hollins left hisself in the dryer too long, shrunk hisself up.” They laughed and blew cigarette smoke in the air. Sandy played their straightman, a role usually reserved for my father. I juggled the grill, steam table, and waffle iron, my arms aching and wooden. We cleaned and cooked till the lunch crowd arrived: men in suits from the bank, women in skirts, a few feed store stragglers. We served the fried chicken special, fried okra, canned corn, masterburgers, and chocolate pie. When it ended, Sandy set her lips in a hard, thin line, the closest she came to a smile.
“You did okay,” she said.
At eight-thirty my second morning, the leather strap of sleigh bells on the front door jangled, and Joe Whelan stepped in. A hat snugged down to his eyes shaded his blond stubble of beard and wet mouth. His corduroy coat gave off an odor of kerosene. For as long as I could remember, he’d worn around his neck a shoestring with a plastic shark’s tooth attached. As he moved to the counter, the men on the stools buzzed in one another’s ears. Joe held out his palm, dotted with pennies, his fingers cracked and cigarette yellowed.
“How much you get for donuts?” he asked. I set aside the spatula and gathered my apron to wipe my hands; the feed store gang watched me closely. No one spoke.
“Two hundred dollars, Mr. Whelan,” I said. “Of course, you could write me your personal check.” Ray Wilson smacked the counter and laughed, the group around him elbowed each other, grinning and shaking their heads. Joe Whelan stared at me, then curled his fingers around his pennies, slid them into his jacket pocket. “I have no use for this,” he said, and pushed out the door.
“His father’s boy all over,” Ray Wilson said, and reached across the counter to slap my shoulder.
The trip from New York to North Carolina is a long one, and like all long car trips, it invites thought. While everyone is asleep in various corners of the car, I think about my father, try to imagine how another year of decline has left him. Last year’s visit, our first since he had the stroke and we placed him in the nursing home, left me shaken, stunned at how nine months’ time could take away his heft, shrivel him, cloud his eyes, ruin his legs. As the white lines move under the car, I try instead to picture him the way he looked in the diner, wide-faced and tanned, lighting cigars or wiping his hands on his apron.
After we arrive in Greensboro, I find my father in his room on the third floor, and I am relieved to discover that the year has changed him only a little; he is thinner, his eyes cloudier. Blue veins are visible beneath his skin. He doesn’t stir much, and I spend most of the day in a chair beside his bed, reading magazines, watching game shows. Jackie joins me there after she has found someone to sit with the kids. She squeezes my hand. On the table next to the bed, shoved in among bedpans and a remote control for the TV, is a tiny fake Christmas tree, not more than six inches tall. Every once in a while, my father opens his eyes, mutters something and points at us.
“Dad?” I say. His breath is foul and full of noise. I talk to him about the diner, about all the food we served up. He doesn’t respond much. Once, he looks at me and says “business,” his fingers shaking, and I come to understand that the decline of the last year has not occurred in his body. When I mention any
one from the old days, he nods quickly and squints, but this has become his response to nearly everything, and I know there is no real memory tied to it.
I had done a half week’s worth of good work I knew would please my father. Sunday morning I got up, slicked my hair, drew on my suit and overcoat, carried my mother’s red-letter Bible to church for early service. It was a bright fall day; my black shoes kicked through tatters of blown leaves on the sidewalk. I sat beside Mrs. Mashburn, so word of my attendance would find its way back to my mother. The regular morning service had been given over to “Teen Day.” Rick Turner, from my geometry class at the Junior High, stood at the front and played “Amazing Grace” on his Sears electric guitar plugged into a shoebox-sized amplifier. Then came a Biblical skit rewritten in teen slang (“Hey, man,” Buddy Greenwell as Jesus said, “cast your nets on the other side and everything will be cool”). I walked home and opened the diner, cooked myself a lunch of chicken steak, gravy, and white bread, then settled in at the grill to ready for the after-church crowd.
The next morning at six, Joe Whelan stepped in behind the feed store group. He stood looking around the diner and fingering his plastic shark’s tooth. My eyes stung; I looked down and began scraping the grill.
“Joe T. Whelan, my best, long-lost friend!” Ray Wilson said, baiting me. “Pull up a stool here, Joe.”
He sat on the stool, placed his hat on the counter, pulled a crinkled five-dollar bill from inside the hatband and straightened its creases. He’d never before had more than a few pennies in hand; I wondered where he’d come by five dollars. Enough money to buy anything listed on the menu.
“Coffee,” he said, “Black.” Sandy shook her head at me, and Ray grinned, excited. I rested the spatula on the grill, wiped my hands on the white apron.