Half the class had laughed, relieved, and half the class had only looked thoughtful, including Ellie her new friend, who resembled Jackie Kennedy and was one of the few married students.
Kennedy couldn’t die. What kind of world would this be, essentially, if the president was assassinated? But presidents had been assassinated before. Lincoln, the great Lincoln. What kind of country was this, that killed its great leaders?
Stella was starting to sob, and she knew this was hysteria. If her parents weren’t gone, she wouldn’t be crying like this. “I was too little,” she whispered to the vacant bus stop. She’d study psychology, not graduate on time, but stay an extra year and be a psychology major instead of an English major. Just stay on at the college. She brushed dirt off her books. Maybe she wouldn’t have sex, not yet. Maybe she wouldn’t go to the gynecologist. Maybe she’d just go to work. She felt encased by drudgery, numb, and impenetrable.
But who was pulling up to the curb? Who was driving a strange car? An old two-toned Chevrolet Bel-Air? Who had come to release her?
Who but her fiancé, reaching across the seat to open the door for her, who but Darl?
She flung herself across the seat into his arms, closed her eyes, exploded into tears, pressed her cheek against his. Inside! She was safe inside. Her cheek was pressed tight against his freckles. She’d always loved his freckles. It made him pure in some strange way. Unique. Veiled. His face proclaimed for him that his essence was behind a curtain, as all of us were always doomed to be. She was trying to get past the veil with her pressing, to enter the safety of his mind, to merge. Not to be alone.
“Hey, hey,” Darl said, laughing a little. “I know it’s a cool car, but, hey, maybe I should have got a Cadillac.”
All she could do was sob.
He took time to put the car in gear, then he reached his right arm around her. “Hey, Stella, baby. Is something wrong?”
She sobbed, moved her eyes down to his shoulder, and blubbered into his shirt. Baby! How could he call her that? She hated it.
“You like the car, don’t you?”
She couldn’t speak.
“Just try to calm down, darling—”
Darling. Darl called her darling and no one ever had before. She took a deep breath. It rattled all the way down into her lungs.
“That’s right. Calm down now. Don’t get unhinged. Try to calm yourself, Stella.”
She opened her eyes. They were driving down Eighth Avenue. He was guiding the car among the sparse traffic.
“Oh, Darl. They’ve shot the president.”
He kept his eyes on the road. “I know,” he said. “I heard.” He spoke quietly. He continued to steer the car.
“Is he all right?”
Darl needed his right hand to steer, to shift again.
“He died.”
“Oh no!” The sobbing was stunned out of her. The car smelled of sulfur. Stella looked straight ahead at cars and delivery trucks flowing down a river. No, a road. “Oh no. Oh no.” The two words flapped like a metal hinge winging through nothingness. She became that hinge becoming unhinged; the phrase broke into two parts, and dropped. Sometimes she moaned “Oh” and sometimes she ineffectually punched the word “No” into the air.
Darl remained quiet for a time. Finally he said, “It’s a pity.”
“Is he really gone?” Stella’s voice quavered. “Are you sure?”
“They say so. On all the stations. I heard it in the cafeteria. The car doesn’t have a radio.”
She said nothing.
“But it’s got a good engine.” He sounded quietly happy. “And I like the colors. Cream and turquoise.”
She said nothing.
“Did you notice the colors?”
“Darl, the president is dead.”
“It’s a pity. I don’t believe in murder. I hate violence.”
“His life is over. It’s all over for him.” The handsome president with the beautiful family was lying someplace on a cold slab. The fluids of his body were being drained away.
“I’m sorry he’s dead,” Darl said soberly. “But in some ways, I guess he deserved it.”
“What do you mean?” She felt like a volcano erupting.
“If he hadn’t backed King and Shuttlesworth and all the colored people, we wouldn’t have had that mess.”
“I’m for integration.”
“Most people think Kennedy’s ruined the South.”
Stella sat up straight, away from him. Out the car window, she watched a large black bird with an ivory bill languidly rowing through the air. “Kennedy was trying to help save the South.”
“I’m sorry he’s dead. I wish he had just pulled back. Been patient.” Darl sighed. “My dad said we’ll never be the same, after Kennedy.”
“But your dad’s not glad?” She noticed her books spilled on the floor of the car. That was the way it was with books: you forgot they existed; you carried them around as though they were part of your own body. Then you looked down, and you were wading in them. She reached down to stack the spilled books onto her lap. How Does a Poem Mean? by John Ciardi. Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton. Paul Tillich’s The Courage to Be.
“I haven’t talked to Dad yet,” Darl said. “You need a satchel for your books.”
The car seemed to be slowing down. The world seemed to be slowing, or was it time?All the King’s Men, by Robert Penn Warren, still lay beside her foot.
“Darl, I think you might be glad.”
“I’d say, more like relieved.”
“Those four girls weren’t doing anything. They were attending their church.”
“But he was doing something. He was backing up their leaders.”
“Murder is murder.” Stella made herself sit perfectly still. Without any movement of her eyes, she stared at the street flowing under the hood of the car. She breathed as shallowly as she could. She wanted to apply the brakes to the flow of time. Pain is pain.
Then she slowly asked Darl to do something she never regretted, not once. She asked him to stop the car. She told him, calmly, that she wanted to get out. She preferred to ride the bus, she said. Before Stella got out, she held out his ring toward him.
“I can’t marry you,” she said.
He gripped the steering wheel hard. Behind his brown freckles, his skin turned pink. His face was like a strange fabric: brown dots on a pink field.
“All right,” he finally said. He shifted into neutral, then raised up the palm of his hand to receive the ring. “I won’t be asking again, Stella. You better be sure.” His eyes were full of hurt pride, or was it pain?
She pressed the ring deep against the skin of his palm and into the flesh. Theringmadescarcelyadentinhisskinbutsatroundandinviolateaseternity in the palm of his hand. The little diamond shattered light prismatically.
AND THEN SHE WAS standing in the gutter, a pile of four books held in the crook of her arm.
Stella watched the back of the turquoise and cream Chevy as he drove away. He seemed sealed up in the car. He became the departing car.
A yellow Volkswagen Beetle crept past her, and she thought Yes, Darl is a peanut inside a one-hump shell, though Darl was not in the Volkswagen. Her gaze shifted to Vulcan, lame-footed in the distance with his arm extended high against a cloudy horizon. Furious with herself for knowing Darl so little, she stamped her hurt foot. Her Aunt Krit was right: she wasn’t going to marry Darl. Not ever.
She looked at the stack of books in her arm, hardcovers with stiff edges, countless pages held between. All the King’s Men. Whatever the books might tell seemed unavailable, as though she had lost the ability to read. But she remembered—sitting beside her mother on the lime green sofa, her mother saying “All the king’s horses and all the king’s men / Couldn’t put Humpty together again.” Two fat tears ran down Stella’s cheeks. Impatiently, she brushed the tears aside.
What did all that matter? Darl and her? A couple of college kids. Unhinged. John F. Kennedy was dead.
&nbs
p; She watched the cream roof of Darl’s car receding in the distance. Another car, an old red Buick, pulled into the lane behind Darl, and he was gone. She was not in any car; if it rolled and scrambled its passengers in a wash of blood, she would not be among them this time.
WITH DISBELIEF, SHE LOOKED at the sunshine. There were no trees to shade the ugly, concrete place where she waited. Here was a gas station, a metal sign proclaiming BUS STOP screwed to a creosote-soaked pole. She had to get to her doctor’s appointment. She had to go to work. Why was everyone moving slowly?
It took an attendant many minutes—was it five? ten?—merely to walk around the front of a red Thunderbird convertible with its ragtop up. (How could a car be so fetching? So beautifully shaped and sexy?) The attendant’s name was embroidered in chain stitch on his pocket:Ryder. He was wearing an old black cowboy hat. He stepped so slowly that she knew Ryder would rather be riding the plains of the West, being a cowboy, out in the open, not confined to this greasy apron of concrete, bending to get an order for gasoline, what octane, how many gallons?
Ryder hadn’t reached the car window yet and already he was preparing a smile, showing his ruined mouth full of bad teeth and the black dead spaces between his teeth. He was still young, not more than thirty, Stella thought, giving his life over to being a grease monkey with filthy hands. He bent his body as though he were old, as though he had already entered his future.
He has grown old, wasted his life bending and smiling. This job has broken his body and spirit. Stella hated what life had dealt this nondescript man named Ryder, how life had cheated him, left him ignorant, fit only for this, a greasy black rag streaming from his hip pocket. Grease the color of midnight splotched his blue trousers. Love his humanity, she enjoined herself.
I can love him.
And after all why not him? Not just as neighbor, fellow human being. Why not accept the card that life dealt us? Call this man not Ryder but Romeo?
When she was twelve and had played with the boy next door, she had wondered Why not marry him? Aren’t any two human beings basically suitable for each other? If they let each other be and also try to help each other? They had played together, shooting each other with rubber suction-cup darts. He was fat, something of an outcast, but she had understood: she was different, too. She liked playing with him. Wasn’t everybody off the mark of normal, she had wondered naively then. So why pick and choose? Why say to anybody:You are not suitable.
Mama had once said to her, “Stella, try not to go to extremes in your thinking.”
But why not? Why not follow logic to the end? Why wasn’t logic as good as faith?
Only there didn’t seem to be any life-logic unless it was all a matter of faith, of God’s plan.
Certainly not her plan.
She watched the too-slender young attendant leaning toward the window that the driver was cranking down. Slender, not skinny, was the term she applied to herself. Poor Ryder. Poor nutrition probably. Bad diet, rotten teeth, yes, she’d seen the evidence in other such men. Ignorant, he didn’t understand the importance of taking care of his teeth. What if she gave herself to one such as Ryder? Would he feel his life was blessed?
Ryder spoke to the driver. “Would you like a flag?” How strange—arrogant—his tone. Full of swagger. “We’re giving them away free today.”
He held out a windshield decal: the Stars and Bars. A Confederate flag.
“No thanks,” the driver answered.
Today! Today, he’s offering a free Confederate flag! Stella felt her pity for the dirty attendant draining away.
Ignorant and poor, he was from the underclass, who served the upper class. The underclass who turned much of their hatred and bitterness toward the blacks. He proudly imagined that it was possible for him to own the car he served, to sit in the driver’s seat. After all, in a free country he could drive a Thunderbird into a filling station, same as anybody.
Ryder straightened up, slightly turned his head. He spat onto the greasy concrete. Was it contempt, this spitting? Maybe his lungs were bad, maybe his sinuses ruined with smoking cigarettes, and he simply had to clear himself.
The driver accepted the spitting as meaningless and told how many gallons to pump.
Stella listened to the soft swish of cars in the street, passing her at dirge speeds. She saw no sign of the bus. The cars crept forward. Darl had driven on without her, and surely there was relief in that. This was the real world, standing on concrete, isolated, struggling against fatigue to hold her books, her ankle throbbing. The world was not a male cheek curtained with freckles. Not that cheek she could wet with her own tears, kiss, playfully lick, if they lay under a giant oak on the grass of Norwood Boulevard.
Surely it was taking the grease monkey more than five minutes to fill the tank. Was he dawdling on purpose? (Darl had squirmed away, laughing, when, on that humid night so oppressive you had to create jokes to endure, she’d licked inside his ear, tasted the bitter wax from deep in the canal.) The driver showed no impatience. Ever so slowly the man in the driver’s seat lit a cigarette. Stella wanted to run to him, to say Stop! This is a gas station. Don’t you realize the danger? The man had frizzy red hair, a large nose, a small chin. He wore glasses with a clear rim. The way he dragged on the cigarettes was somewhat theatrical, too slow.
Stella moved her hand to scratch her nose. She saw her own hand had been slowed down, and it occurred to her that her perception might be distorted. The motion had not felt slower; it had only looked slower. John F. Kennedy was dead. Time had woven itself into the air, and now they all lived unreal in a new matrix.
There were no authentic checks or tests to distinguish dream from reality, so said Descartes.
Standing in the doorway of the classroom with his cigarette hand out in the hall, Dr. Drummer had confided to the class that he had thought there were ways to tell the difference between dream and reality. And can you distinguish memory and imagination? she had wanted to ask. Which of them is real? Dizzy with memory, her body was lying in the cemetery on the towel near the giant magnolia tree. And Darl. He had been really there, too. The professor had leaned his body out into the hall to drag on the cigarette: he was obeying the rule for faculty not to smoke in the classroom.
Suddenly the dark men, like ghosts, had been standing on the grass very near her and Darl. It was as though they’d come out of the ground. Nothing had ever seemed so real.
Once, Dr. Drummer had confessed, he himself had had a mental illness, hallucinations. Stella had admired the matter-of-fact way he told the class something stigmatizing and private. Once Dr. Drummer had thought he had seen electric wires running everywhere, but he had tested the perception. He had approached the wall crawling with snakelike electric wires and tried to touch one: then the black cords had disappeared. As he finished his story, he pushed his glasses, black plastic frame, more securely up his nose. Dr. Drummer explained he had used one sense to test the other. You could test reality. Descartes’s “Dream Problem”—solved. She doubted it.
Ryder spoke again. “Didn’t notice the out-of-state plates. Staying down here long?”
“I think so,” the man answered and fished dollar bills out of the slit of his wallet.
Ryder put his hands on his hips. “Fine day, ain’t it?” he said.
She winced to think of Darl, smug behind his freckles, unaffected by murder. Probably it was someone just like this Ryder who had pulled the trigger.
The red-haired driver said nothing about the fineness of the day. “Would you mind to get the windshield?”
Maybe she was watching a contest. But usually the attendant did the windshield without any prompting. (Suppose she never married anybody.) The driver didn’t have to be trying to dominate Ryder. (“Don’t come unhinged,” Darl had said to her.)
Ryder moved suddenly, like a spring uncoiling. “Sure thing.”
How could you interpret motives, when observation itself was subjective? She had not believed Dr. Drummer’s proof. Because she saw that
he had taken comfort in it, she’d offered no challenge: Why can’t more than one sense enter into the delusion? Why can’t hallucinations just come and go randomly? Didn’t life? (When she’d given back the ring to Darl, she had pressed the circle hard into his palm.)
In his “Third Meditation,” Descartes had had the honesty to say there was no proof, only faith. His faith was that a universe bleared with illusion would be a cruel joke on humankind, and his faith was that God was no Jokester. But Descartes had not questioned the faith that other civilizations might have in other gods, and those gods not burdened with the attributes of omniscience, omnipotence, and kindness might have a different nature, some of them certainly pranksters to be appeased. (She was not going to marry Darl.)
“Now, would you check the air pressure,” the driver said.
And Stella felt certain he was pushing Ryder.
“All the way from New York, huh?” Ryder said. And his voice purposely conveyed suspicion. “My line won’t reach. You’ll have to move back some.” Menace in his tone, a warning: back up, back off.
“I think it’ll reach,” the driver said smoothly. “Would you mind trying?”
For a moment neither of them moved. The driver drew on his cigarette.
Suddenly Ryder spat again, but he walked around, pulled out the air hose and gauge, and checked the pressure.
Stella saw her bus in the distance, just the front of it. By faith, she assumed the unperceived body of the bus followed behind its face. About Darl, she had assumed too much. He had dropped the ring into the open slit of his madras plaid shirt pocket.
“Tires is normal,” Ryder said to the driver. He sounded little and tired, the starch gone out of him.
Again Stella felt a rush of sympathy for Ryder. She wondered if he even owned his own car. What did the Thunderbird driver know about struggle? He looked nothing like a cowboy. If he spins out, Stella decided, I’ll hate him.
The Thunderbird driver reached to his panel, flipped on the radio, and classical music poured out. He drove away carefully. She saw the Empire State on his car tag. Maybe he didn’t know the southern language of contempt, how to lay down rubber at the feet of your opponent. Instead, Chopin’s “Revolutionary” etude was billowing out.
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