“Don’t sweat it. Nothing fazes Mother. She’s got a set of manners that covers everything. When Dad died in the ice storm, she read up on Thank You Notes in Reply to Letters of Condolence.”
“You’re making that up.”
“She’ll look over the chapter on Divorce in Close Family Members, Such as a Daughter or Son.”
“I owe her a lot.”
“Me.”
“Besides that.” I looked at him, at the way the freckles had faded together into what looked now like a deep wind-burn. How the brick red hair had faded to a dark rosy brown. To me he was always Andy and Drew, rolled into one.
“She thinks you’re great,” he said. “There’s never been any love lost between her and Mary Virginia. You know that. She never warmed to that Dallas routine.” He picked up the ’27 Oyster and waved it in front of my eyes. It was countdown time.
I nodded and leaned over to kiss him on the nose. Then the mouth. Then we washed up the kitchen. We threw out the rims of fat from the steak and the rest of the loaf of bread, putting them out back for whatever might come along: raccoons, black bears, bobcats. Probably nothing that wild anymore; these days more likely bluetick hounds from one of the nearby farms.
Together we closed up the house, got my car out, and padlocked the shed. Turned his truck around. Then we stood a minute. It was good when we weren’t in such an awful hurry, when we didn’t just wave and rush off, looking at the sky over our shoulders, hoping nothing would drop out of it on the way back.
“We never talk about the kids,” I said.
“Sure we do. What do you mean? We did. We’re going to invite them to the wedding, remember?”
“What if the girls want to stay in town? I mean even in the summer?”
“Then they can stay in town. Come out weekends.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what I think about that. They’re such jocks, their lives totally revolve around the teams they’re playing on. They talk about this ecology; argue it all the time. Cows. But the truth is, their eyes light up most when they’re competing. Even Earth Day, which they’re already working on like crazy, the main event for them is the marathon run along Lake Brazos. Lord, of all the people in the world to end up with these giant jocks for children, I’m the last one you’d imagine. I thought, if I thought at all, that I’d have a couple of little sweet-faced soft-voiced wallflowers. The kind I was always going to have to be nagging to get out there and make friends or get interested in something. You know?”
“Instead,” Drew said, helping me into the car and leaning in the window to finish talking, “I’m the one expected to have the giant jocks and ended up with the sweet-faced wallflowers. You never can tell.”
“Drew, don’t. Don’t ever say that. What a thing to say. Trey and Jock are the”—I bit my tongue not to say sweetest, which was the first word that came to mind—“neatest, brightest boys in the world. And the most athletic. Come on. What’s got into you? They’re great tennis players, good students, and … great guys.”
“Yeah, forget it. Hell, Cile, we never have time to even have half a conversation about anything. I’m not dumping on the boys. You know that. It was a joke. We need to get this done and get ourselves out here where we can have time to start something and finish it. I was thinking again about what’s going on up the road. How they don’t get the picture that when you lose the grasslands you lose the country. Thinking that with my luck, the boys would both end up being Dallas lawyers, representing the government in its fight between the superfluous supercollider and the nesters down here south of Waxahachie making all the trouble.”
“I know. I just had an attack of the nerves.”
“I’ll call tomorrow.”
“Okay.”
“I love you, honey.”
“You’re right, the bikes are swell.”
While I warmed up the Pontiac, Drew headed back toward his pickup, singing off key, “All My Exes Live in Texas.”
THE HAIL HAD moved on, south and west, the line of clouds now a distant stacked wall on the horizon where the land shifted from cane to grain. As the sun showed through, I passed a roadside litter sign saying DON’T MESS WITH TEXAS and a pasture filled with black and white Maine d’Anjous chewing their way through Monday afternoon. A car passed me on the narrow two-lane farm-to-market, slowing to check for tractors around the curb. The bumper sticker on her back fender read MY DAUGHTER AND MY MONEY BOTH GO TO A & M. And, on radio’s Best Country in the City station, someone started singing, “I’m just catching up with yesterday, by tomorrow I should be ready for today.”
Lord, how fine it all was. How long I’d waited for today.
But, to be honest, if dancing in Waco hadn’t been all but banned, we’d never have got our children as grown as we did. If we’d found ourselves moving around the dance floor once more any sooner, likely we’d have made an awful mess, had a wild affair breaking hearts right and left, our own included. How could we have ever got together with four babies? How could we have pulled apart those Baby Days’ homes?
From the minute he’d shown back up in my life, at Lila Beth’s that first Easter, I’d had dancing with him on my mind. I’d waltzed around the smooth floors of the parsonage all that next week—remembering the dances we’d had, back when everything had been all right, our parents all in place, us thinking of nothing but holding on and moving our feet.
And soon, like an answer to a prayer, Eben and I had got a thick vellum invitation to the Cotton Ball Pageant, with its small enclosure card, its tiny envelope for our reply, “Complimentary” written across the price, Lila Beth’s name listed as sponsor. A gesture she’d clearly set in motion before I’d turned out to be that suspect girl from Andy/Drew’s past; too late to change her mind, if she’d wanted to.
I was delirious with excitement. The younger Mrs. Dr. Croft, whose son and daughter I’d tutored into Stanford and Duke, had been to all the socials in the state. She and her husband (and the older Dr. and Mrs. Croft as well) were part of the circuit. They did Idlewild in Dallas, Fiesta in San Antonio, the Rose Festival in Tyler, a dozen others. But her favorite, the one she used to talk about the most, was the Cotton Ball in Waco. “I think the reason that one’s so special,” she’d said, “is that dancing is still so spicy up there. It’s like drinking during Prohibition must have been. You can actually feel the excitement like fireworks when everybody gets out on the floor and actually hug dances, as they call it. Isn’t that rich? It’s forbidden at Baylor, you know. So the old folks have formal promenades with the men and women in facing rows, and the younger set has functions, as they call them, meaning nighttime garden parties with a band, where everyone takes off their shoes and splashes their feet to four-four time in the swimming pool. It’s that literal way Wacoans all talk. Saying ‘lap baby,’ when they mean a nursing infant, and ‘knee baby’ when they mean one who’s weaned. No telling what they call sex. ‘Hip coupling’?”
I’d been a voyeur of such dances for years, reading about them in the Sunday paper back in the university even when I was doing nothing much but studying, deciding what to do with my life other than not become a teacher like the woman who’d married my dad. I’d see pictures of the guests—sometimes the older or the younger Mrs. Dr. Croft, whose ambitious children were still in my future—in their long (and then short and then long again) gowns, of satin, chiffon, crepe, peau de soie, georgette, names from novels, captured in the orangy colors of the Living Section. Sometimes the dances were called charity balls and held in the ballrooms of downtown hotels; sometimes they were galas that took place in almost-finished skyscrapers or automobile showrooms before the cars were delivered; sometimes benefits, black-tie events out-of-doors, in city parks, on riverboats, on docks by the lake hung with lights, orchestras playing to the stars.
As soon as the invitation came, I’d spread my treasure trove of gowns on the bed—my secret dowry, which I’d kept stored in the back of the large linen closet in the hall of the parsonage. (It had alw
ays seemed strange to me how the families who’d first lived in the seventy-year-old house had had enough linens—monogrammed towels, hemmed sheets, appliquéd runners—to fill two deep closets, yet so few clothes that the parents shared a single shallow one.) The legacy of dresses had, of course, come to me from the younger Mrs. Dr. Croft. So pleased had she been at my results with her children that she’d insisted on some extra gift above my fee, some special present just for me. A week at a health spa? An airline ticket? I hadn’t even had the manners to hesitate. I knew she never wore the same formal twice; I’d seen that from the papers. They had to be somewhere, I’d reasoned. Packed off to the Next to New Shop, or at that very moment languishing in the back of one of her walk-in closets.
My request seemed to please her. “Get your mind off that high school beau of yours,” she’d said. “Get you out there with better options.” Then, locating the gowns, packing them lovingly in tissue paper and garment bags, she’d hesitated. “They look so dated, dear. Honestly. Clothes you think are the latest thing look worse than old hairstyles. You wonder what on earth you could have been thinking of.”
Spread out on my bed in Waco, they looked as if some magic trunk from the past had produced them. What wonders, the yards of fine fabrics, with tiny hooks or invisible zippers, tucks and linings and finishing seams a work of art. Some with lace across the strapless bodices, some with petticoats under layered taffeta, some with brilliants in a band around the chiffon neckline. My favorite: a floating white gown with a halter neck, narrow waist, and skirt a full circle at the ankles. It had been worn to a Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers Gala. And the photos in the paper had lines of lyrics under the beaming guests: Shall we still be together with our arms around each other, shall we dance? On the clear understanding that this sort of thing can happen, shall we dance?
Eben had scratched around in the deep loam of his conscience trying to decide if we should accept. It wasn’t, after all, he reasoned, as if he was a Baptist preacher, although there was the general community at large to consider. And the invitation had been proffered by Mrs. Williams, the mainstay, in fact one of the elders, of his church. That must indicate that it was acceptable for us to go; especially since the tickets were complimentary.
Seeing the wealth of gowns I’d spread out on the bed, he was angry. He’d only hesitated, he explained, fearing I might not have a dress to wear; that our budget would not stretch for something new. I’d said I didn’t realize he’d never seen them, not able to admit how much I’d liked keeping them secret, how much I’d liked having something of my own he didn’t share.
As it turned out, the formals were inappropriate, the ball was actually only a pageant, and we didn’t get to dance.
I’d asked Mary Virginia to stop by, to help me choose one to wear. She had been kind, somewhat embarrassed, explaining that the Cotton Ball Pageant was an umbrella term for what was really a dozen events. Suppers for the princesses and their escorts, parties for the queen and the entire court, a sponsor’s evening for the parents and out-of-town friends (this did have dancing, and perhaps my doctor’s wife had come to that?), a garden brunch on Sunday for all the people who put the week together. That, actually, we were invited only to the nighttime pageant, to which people dressed up, but in cocktail clothes, no black tie, so they could sell more seats.
“You could describe the scenes yourself, Cile, even though you just moved here. It’s all the same old stories, each with about a zillion people participating, all of whose kinfolks pay to come. The tepees on the west bank of the Brazos; hauling the first load of cotton across the suspension bridge; the first skyscraper west of the Mississippi, south of Kansas City; the invention of Dr. Pepper. Same old stuff.” She’d laughed, sitting on my bed, holding up first one dress and then another as she pretended to act out the scenes.
“But so much money for that—” I was crushed.
“Oh, well, those tickets aren’t general admission. We get a buffet first, and special seats, and the big reception afterward, you know, the perks. That’s for being part of the crowd who gets to arrive from somewhere else and adjourn somewhere else while all the mob are trying to find their cars and their kids.”
Possibly I looked close to tears.
“I can lend you something,” she said, “if this is all you’ve got. Don’t go buy anything.”
But I shook my head. I was going to wear one of those anyway, in case this was the nearest I ever got to a ball in this life. The white Ginger Rogers chiffon with the halter neck would do just fine. I didn’t care if I looked out of place; I had my own agenda. I could write the younger Mrs. Dr. Croft that I had been to the Cotton Ball Pageant in her Buick Showroom Gala gown.
THE CITY LIMITS sign said: WEST, CZECH POINT OF CENTRAL TEXAS. West stood in relation to Waco as Round Rock had to Austin when Drew and I were dating: out of town but near at hand. And with the same mix of county marketplace and elegant little city that Round Rock had had twenty-plus years ago. I felt at home here, and it made me happy to know that soon I would be. I liked to drive along the clean, paved streets, around the square, because there were always old cars pulled up like horses to the posts in front of the Victorian stores.
Today, there was a dull green Chevy pickup that Drew would have loved; older than his shiny red rebuilt ’58. I’d learned to tell that, because it had single headlights and rounded back fenders, not double heads and flaring fenders. Beside it, a Model A was parked, black and shiny as a mirror, but something about it wasn’t authentic. It had been messed with by a street rodder; the windows had been lowered. Still, the two of them made a good pair, echoes of the past sitting side by side, somewhat like a grandfather and father come to town for the day, the older man dressed spit clean as if for church, the younger still in faded work pants and boots.
If we lived at the farm together, I could turn back and get Drew. We could walk around the vehicles, have a Dr. Pepper in the drugstore, and watch for the owners out the window. The farmer, maybe, coming out of the feed and seed store, the banker, probably, bringing a customer out to admire his antique toy. Drew could talk motors to them and introduce his new wife.
Turning from the square into the residential area, moving at a crawl, I could see that almost every front yard had a staked campaign sign reading CZECH YOUR BALLOT. A reminder that even here in what seemed like day before yesterday, a woman was running a strong race for governor of the state.
It wasn’t much out of the way to swing by the rodeo grounds, and I did; the weather was holding, my tires were in good shape, and it seemed a fine idea to return to the site of the Czech Fest, where it had all started up again between me and Drew. There was nothing much out there now, midafternoon on a weekday. A tent where maybe there’d recently been a livestock sale, a couple of pickups. Evidence showing where the recent hail had bit the dust. A power line eaten through by fire ants.
We’d most likely both gone to every dance festival in the area for years, missing each other in the crowds of thousands. I’d taken the girls to the Mexican Cinco de Mayo, the German Oktoberfest, the Czech Fest at West, all with their own sausage, beer and polkas, all with that wonderful fairground atmosphere.
Three years ago this coming September, I’d gathered the girls, then nine and ten, and driven them up the interstate north toward West. It was hot as midsummer, baking hot, and I was in a thin cotton skirt and T-shirt, my hair pulled back with barrettes, sandals on my feet. We’d worked out the rules about spending money and not getting lost and our point of rendezvous, and I was heading through a crowd the size of a small city toward the sound of the loudest band.
Then, right in my path, walking single file in total concentration, like scouts in the wilderness, appeared Trey and Jock. My heart went smashing against the walls of my chest, and I looked in front of them and behind. No parent.
“Look who’s here,” I said. “Where are the big people?”
They laughed, little neat country-club gentlemen of nine and ten in tennis whites, socks an
d sneakers that looked fresh from the sporting goods store, shiny clean cheeks. Both had trim haircuts, a bit of Trey’s red-gold cowlick shooting skyward at the crown, a tuft of Jock’s dark locks falling across his forehead.
“Mom’s in Dallas,” Jock said, looking up at me, for they had not yet got their growth and were still skinny little baby-faced boys.
“I think we’re supposed to call her Mary Virginia to her friends.” Trey, his freckles still thick as measles, asked with total seriousness, “What should we say?”
I tried to match his tone. “I think you say ‘our mother.’ ”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“How about ‘our father’?” I asked, giving them a grin.
“—is in Heaven.” Jock doubled over with laughter.
Trey gave him a stern big-brother glare. “Our dad is dancing, Mrs. Tait.” Then, hearing his words (how could their dad be dancing if their mom was in Dallas?), he made the sudden gulp that I remembered well, the one that went with watching his purple Popsicle slide off its stick onto the floor, and amended himself. “I mean he’s watching the dancing in the tent.” He pointed. “Over there.”
“What’s this ‘Mrs. Tait’? You knew better than that at three.”
Trey frowned. “Our mother has us call her friends ‘aunt.’ ”
“Cile it is to you guys.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Jock came close enough to touch me and sort of rocked up and down. “You ever think about opening a camp?” he asked.
“Not once, not one time. You go to camp, now, don’t you?”
“Last year was our first,” Trey answered for them. “We’re probably going to be counselors.” He gazed off at his future.
“I sure wish you had a camp,” Jock said, still rocking.
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