EQMM, May 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "He looks like a bird,” he told Dale, hardly a sympathetic ear when it came to his concerns about her only son. Watching Donny bounce before him, Don was embarrassed, though he tried not to be, and he wanted to smack his son's bob-bobbing head, which he did, his hand like a snake striking and faster than he could stop it, as if his hand had shot out from somewhere behind him, someone else's hand, someone else's girlish boy fueling his rage with half-witted dancing about. Just as quickly, he pulled his hand back with the snap of regret. Surely God encouraged his lessons in obedience and modesty but what good did it do to hit the boy? His son just looked so wayward, moving in front of the TV as if under a spell, not turning to look at his father when he was addressed and finally struck.

  "Donny, are you ignoring me? If all this music does is encourage disrespect, then I think you'll understand when I turn it off,” Don said.

  "No sir,” Donny answered without turning around, his shoulders tensed in anticipation of what might come next. “I don't mean any disrespect. It's just I don't want to miss this."

  "Well, look at me when I'm talking to you."

  When his son turned to face him in silence, Don intended to tell him it was about time he had his hair cut, too, feeling his hand rise at his side, ready to strike again. But the boy's watery eyes, barely visible beneath his bangs, left Don despairing of his defiant son. He felt cheated by the boy's refusal to acknowledge him or the slap across the back of his head. His mother's son. Dale's babying of the boy had been a sore point between them since he was born—hadn't his own father's sense of discipline better prepared Don for the realities of life? Don felt weakened by the stranger before him, at odds with and abandoned by a wife gone soft.

  "I don't want to hear any more in this house. You hear?” Don said.

  "You can't...” Donny turned to his father.

  "Sure I can,” Don said. “As your father, it's my responsibility to keep this sort of Godless trash out of our home. You think I burned your records for the fun of it? I didn't like it anymore than you did, but sometimes a father has to do unpleasant things in the hopes his children will grow up decent."

  "But Dad..."

  "Starting ... right ... now.” Don reached over his pouting son's shoulder and switched off the television with as much fuss as the little knob allowed. “And come Friday,” he said, “you're going to cut your hair. When I get back from Atlanta, I want to see your hair cut, you hear. If your mother won't take you, I will. And you better believe it will be a haircut fit for a boy."

  Don returned to his chair and his newspaper, relaxing with the satisfaction that he had finally put a stop to his son's disrespect. But Donny turned back to the dark television in silence, his head resuming its aggravating bounce as if the music still played. Not for the first time, Don silenced his rage with thoughts of Mary Hooks: daydreams of her mouth as she chewed slowly at the caramels he bought her settled him in a state of impatient pleasure, each sensation of her driving his desire for another.

  When Don first realized his feelings for the supply clerk who processed his sales orders, he was surprised by how hungry he was, by how much pleasure he found when he finally let himself go to her bed. He must have been famished, he reckoned. Surely God would recognize his need for the affections of a woman, even if she wasn't his wife. It was not something he could talk about with Preacher Avery, not like he did about Donny. He reasoned the guilt he suffered upon leaving her house, the very stealth of his entry and exit, was God's punishment enough. And each night he prayed for forgiveness and guidance. What was he supposed to do? He loved the girl, loved every inch of her. Don loved Dale too, but he could not recall ever feeling as high as he did when he was with Mary—a sky-scraping sensation of matchless joy. There was life in that girl. In weaker moments, Don actually let himself imagine a time and place, in another city, another state, where he and Mary might finally be joined under God's eyes.

  Don's mother had been a distant woman who spent her days in Bible study and charity work, though she never seemed to share her dedication with Don. He married Dale in part because she seemed so different from his mother, attentive and devoted to him and their home. But after Donny was born, her attentions shifted to her son, and the interest she had once saved for him never returned. Once he fell for Mary, Don gradually withdrew from Dale, finding either exhaustion or frustration or both stealing any desire he might have felt for her. There was little pleasure when he went to her in the darkness of their bedroom, no newness in her body. And not a word from her, as if she were merely fulfilling a duty. Don knew too that Dale would not do the things Mary did, never unearth in him the bliss buried within for so long. Don wondered with some irritation whether she was watching the same idiocy on television.

  He still hadn't forgiven her asking him for The Beatles tickets. What in hell could she hear in that so-called music? She had been dizzy with excitement—seen usually upon the gift of a new appliance—when she asked him. Can you, Don? Can you get me those tickets? I'll do just anything to see The Beatles in Atlanta. And then, when the God-awful noise came over the transistor radio by her bed, she turned it up so loud his whole mood was ruined. A gift from him, too, that radio. He endured the same foolishness from Donny, but it was Mary's request that sent his uppers and lowers into a grinding clash so his neck and jaw troubled him the next day. He would have to put his foot down about the music, a small favor she could surely do for him. Hadn't she had her eye on a jadeite-green waffle iron from Rival?

  * * * *

  Mary Hooks, age twenty-two, stone supply clerk and Beatles fan, convinced her lover Don Palmer, Senior, to get tickets for her and a girlfriend when The Beatles played the new stadium in Atlanta. At first he had refused, upset with her over the small request. But Mary Hooks had learned at fifteen how to quiet men. And Don was no different. Don was a real puppy dog, though he could hardly look her in the eyes afterwards. She knew he believed God looked down on them with displeasure, that what they did was a sin. She also knew Don would not resist, just as she could not resist the spark of joy she recognized in his eyes when she came to him. There was goodness in Don, such that she let herself believe him when he offered promises of marriage, a life together one day—so often made as he searched her naked body with his eyes, reluctant, it seemed, to touch her, as if she were some hallowed ground that might disappear if his eyes left her.

  Other men she had known were all as easily quieted. As a teenager there had been boys in high school, a few from the junior college in Columbus, and one from the chemical supply. There were strangers, too, older men of business on the road. Mary was eager to indulge a few restless nights when it felt okay, less of a sin under the light of loneliness, her father long gone, her mother dead, the aunt who raised her always too tired to be any sort of genuine company. And then Don: such a serious man in brown trousers and starched white shirt, always a tie, who came undone with the slightest affection, who claimed his love like no other could. He bought her things. He got her tickets to see The Beatles in Atlanta. All she had to do in return was a few small favors.

  * * * *

  "I want to hear The Beatles, please,” Donny told Mary from the other side of the screen door, rain coming down around him. When he looked at her with watery blue eyes, Mary Hooks knew she was going to cross a line that was about more than maintaining small favors and finding a new Featherweight sewing machine in the mail.

  "I'm supposed to be getting my hair cut, and my dad gets back tonight,” Donny added before stepping up into Mary's two-bedroom bungalow, as if with this information she might reconsider letting him inside. “He's going to kill me if I don't do what he asked,” Donny said, still inside the doorway.

  Mary wondered herself what Don might do. Over the course of their love affair, now six months deep, she had endured endless complaints about his son. She wondered why such little things like a haircut and electric guitar music were worth souring a relationship with your only son.

  "I'm sure he'll come around. He'
s just ... I mean, I'm sure he's just old-fashioned, that's all. Give him time.” She held out her hand. “You're soaked. Let me get you a towel."

  "Thanks. You want a cherry sour?” Donny offered her the bag.

  "Aren't you sweet,” Mary said, taking the bag from him, a few of the candies spilling to the kitchen floor.

  "Now, that towel. You want something to drink? Iced tea, milk? I got chocolate syrup."

  "No, I mean ... no, thank you. I just want to hear The Beatles, please. You said I could hear The Beatles.” Donny shuffled from foot to foot, nearly dancing before the music had been played.

  Mary brought Donny a towel that smelled of jasmine. “You want to sit down?"

  Donny ran the towel over his head and arms, and sat down on Mary's Chippendale sofa, faded rose damask more at home in her aunt's house. But as soon as she had put the needle down on the A-side of The Beatles’ new single, “Paperback Writer,” Donny stood to dance. He moved with an abandon she had rarely seen from folks in Lake Claire. She marveled at the freedom the boy, so nervous in her doorway with his bag of cherry sours, displayed in her living room, hardly aware, it seemed to her, he was in a stranger's house. Donny's arms, legs, and feet moved wildly, his head bounced as if it might fly off at any minute, and his eyes remained shut. His face revealed an easy joy Mary recognized as the same she had seen from Don when she kissed him. The stereo needle lifted automatically from the record, and Donny beamed at Mary, sweat glistening on his smooth, hairless face.

  "Play it again."

  Mary obliged, replacing the arm of her Magnavox stereo console, a present from Don three months earlier. She returned to the sofa and watched Donny dance again, his long blond hair whipping in the air, his eyes closed as he absorbed the music. When the song had finished again, Mary put on the B-side, “Rain,” and moved with the rhythm of the otherworldly song, enjoying the sense of a previously unimagined place far from Lake Claire, the jangle and thump of guitar and drum, the drone of ghostly voices in harmony like she had never ever heard. With thoughts of otherworldly rain, so unlike the dismal steady soaking that came down around them, Mary reached carefully for the boy, finding behind girlish bangs the same hunger she had seen in his father's eyes, the same hunger that drew her to them all.

  Can you hear me? John Lennon sang in a voice of vapor and mystery.

  * * * *

  Driving southwest along Interstate 85 from Atlanta, Don Senior's thoughts were on Mary Hooks as he hummed Frank Sinatra's “Strangers in the Night,” and indulged in thoughts of her rosy skin, her dark hair, the curve of her lips, the way her pants fit her narrow hips, and the false eyelashes she had begun to wear that reminded Don of Brigitte Bardot. He had picked up the Sinatra single for Mary in Atlanta; he planned to play it for her when he stopped by as a surprise before going home. A steady drizzle kept the summer dusk gray, but Don had the car window down. He enjoyed the cool, wet breeze, one Tareyton after another, and a bottle of Old Crow he had planned to open with Mary but, in a good mood, opened early, taking long drinks from the quart bottle. Don wasn't a drinker, but he knew Mary liked a taste now and then, and, like his father, he believed the occasional nip good for the body. By the time he turned off of I-85 onto a two-lane state road, however, Don had finished a third of the Old Crow and smoked half a pack of cigarettes. With the easy rhythms of the Sinatra song in his head, the warmth of bourbon in his belly, and the idea of Mary waiting for him, Don smiled, right hand on the wheel, his left holding a cigarette out the window as a cool mist fell across his arm.

  In her bed again, the smell of jasmine would stir him, the sight of her often more than he could take without his throat tightening so he could hardly breathe. For this he would lie to Dale and probably later have to cover for that lie and the one before it too, his list of fictions long enough that most wives would have already stumbled upon the obvious. Not Dale. Before returning home, Don would have to smoke at least another half-dozen cigarettes to hide Mary's perfume. And he managed their checking account, not that Dale ever looked, to hide the money he spent somewhat recklessly on Mary: from bottles of peach brandy to the chiffon housecoats and the latest appliances from General Electric and Zenith she pined for. All of this for the love of a short-haired supply clerk named Mary Hooks.

  * * * *

  When they had listened to “Rain” three more times, dancing slowly to the last two, Mary pulled a record from a stack on top of the stereo cabinet and placed it on the turntable. She took Donny by the hand and pulled him towards her bedroom as the first strains of “I've Just Seen a Face” came through the console speakers. Mary was no fool; she knew where this evening led, and she knew it was wrong. Yet the desire she saw in the boy's face, whether for the simple pleasure of dancing in her living room, away from the repressive air of his father's house, or some more fundamental yearning, driven by curiosity and nature, was irresistible. Mary could satisfy that hunger, which filled a hole that always threatened to tear her in two. In quieter moments, when she surrendered to a head-hanging shame for the things she had done, she wondered what devils her parents had been, what sins they had committed and left for her to bear. It was then she wanted most to drown in her troubled waters, to put an end to her own longing, to fill the hole up with red clay and silence.

  Donny stopped and smiled in recognition, his blue eyes wide with gratitude and a flicker of hesitation. "Rubber Soul," he said. “My mother gave me this record last Christmas, just like I asked. Made my father madder than hell."

  "Your mother sounds like a very nice lady.” Mary smiled at him again. Outside, the rain came down harder; thunder growled overhead.

  "Yeah, I guess so,” Donny said, his stomach knotting at the thought of his mother at home. Donny looked beyond Mary to her bedroom and back to her, a question on his lips he could not ask. He guessed what might happen in there, but his feet seemed fixed to the pineboard floors. Dancing with Mary, Donny felt swaddled in the scent of her, a scent he couldn't name, though it felt as familiar and calming to him as the smell of his mother's dressing room. With the curl of her hair on his neck, her breath in his ear, and the sound of rain outside and in, Donny felt at home and wondered how he would ever return to his parents’ house.

  Mary held out her hand to him. “Don't worry, honey. I won't burn your records."

  * * * *

  Outside Mary Hooks’ kitchen door, Don Palmer, Senior, stood in the rain with the bottle of Old Crow and a bag of caramels in one hand and the Sinatra record in the other, listening to the heavy beat of rock-'n'-roll music and grinding his top canines into his bottom ones. When he tried the door, he found it locked. Peering in through the kitchen window, Don saw no one. But hearing the sound of rock-'n'-roll music drained the pleasure he had nurtured on the drive home right out of him. He had cautioned Mary about listening to such garbage, this hoax on the ears, this foreign fashion—for wasn't that all it was, a fad—but here she was, behind his back, doing just that. He held his finger on the doorbell for nearly a minute so she might hear it over the music. When Mary finally answered the door, the music had stopped and she stood there as if he might be a traveling salesman trying to unload a vacuum cleaner.

  "It's me, Mary-girl. What's going on?” Don's face had gone red, his jaw locked so in aggravation he didn't notice she bit nervously at her bottom lip.

  "You're back.” Mary opened the kitchen door, but the screen door stood between them.

  "Of course I'm back, honey. It's Friday, like I told you. I'm getting soaked out here."

  "Of course. Just ... I wasn't expecting you.” She straightened her blouse, clutching it at its neck, unlatched the screen door for him, and let him inside. She smelled the whiskey on him.

  "I know. I wanted to surprise you. Got you something from Atlanta.” He pulled the Sinatra record from a paper bag.

  "That's nice. Have you been drinking? That's not like you.” Mary moved to the kitchen where she put on a pot of water to boil, hardly listening to Don at all.

  "I only h
ad a taste of this Old Crow I bought for us to share. Just enough to put me in a fine mood—that is, until I heard that racket. You know how I feel."

  "This isn't exactly a good time, Don. I'm not feeling so good. All this rain, I guess.” Mary kept her back to Don as she fumbled with teacups.

  Sensing an unusual nervousness in his mistress's behavior, Don offered her a candy from his bag of caramels as a peacemaker. Since he was already at her house, he didn't see the harm in wrapping himself in her intoxicating smells and staying longer than he had planned. He would just have to dream up a bigger lie for Dale when he got home.

  "Well, I got something might make you feel a whole lot better. You're going to love this so much more than that noise. Bring us a couple of glasses and some ice. And sit down, I don't need any tea.” Don moved to the living room, sitting down on the sofa as if he lived there.

  The bag of cherry sours on her coffee table gave Don Palmer his second feeling of out-of-placeness. He couldn't figure out if it was he who felt out of place or the bag of cherry sours. He had never seen Mary Hooks eat anything but caramels and this bag of cherry sours looked like they had just then been plopped down on her coffee table and offered up.

  "I didn't know you liked cherry sours,” Don said, picking up the bag of candy, examining it as if the answer might be inside.

  "I didn't,” she said, “but I do now. I've had enough of caramels, anyhow."