“That bitch,” I tell August, “will take five dollars of my hard-earned money this month.”
“Shhh,” he says, patting my hands. “Shhhh.”
KEY LIME
Saturday night, it rains an apocalypse. The crowds stay home, mostly, and we play an almost empty hall out in Nags Head, one wild drunk table of five, getting ever louder, ever drunker; one solid couple dancing every single song, having a night out in the rain, perhaps, because they’d promised each other. The couple leaves at nine but the table stays until closing, so we keep playing. But five people’s energy isn’t enough of a meal, and with nothing for us to feed on, we play a wholly uninspired set. Like the music you’d hear at a grocery. The ferry is docked because of the storm, so we take a taxi all the way down 158 back to Janet’s house, and when we get there, we find that Caroline has turned up. She’s curled up on Janet Silvers’s couch, dressed in the most beautiful purple and pink spackled dress, its bodice as clean and uncreased as if the wind has picked her up and blown her the six hundred miles. A curtain of deep auburn hair has fallen over her face, so that all we can see are her made-up lips. Vermilion, they are. Maybe scarlet.
“Poor thing,” Janet whispers. “I told her you were out playing a show. She said you’ve never written back to give her your travel schedule.”
“That’s because I never invited her here in the first place.”
But Janet’s not listening. “Poor thing,” she says again, and pulls Caroline’s hair gently back so we can all look on her pale face. Deeply asleep like that, she doesn’t mind her teeth while she snores through her open mouth. She looks like the Easter Bunny. It’s perfectly gruesome. “Poor child,” Janet whispers again, as if it’s my fault, the dark circles under Caroline’s eyes, the hair now splayed in different directions over Janet’s throw pillow.
Come Sunday, they’re both at the breakfast table by the time August and I wake, Caroline in one of Janet’s dresses, halving her canteloupe slices; Janet bustling around the kitchen, slamming cabinet doors, sniffing pantry shelves, looking for something. “I’m skipping church,” she says brightly, “to make lunch for this poor angel.”
Skipping church is probably a real detriment to her chances at marriage, since Pear Adams, Sr., a widowed deacon twice her age, has been (she’s confided to August) making inquiries. It’s upper choir Sunday, but poor Deacon Adams will have to do without her angel’s voice this week. August smirks as he pours my glass of orange juice, as though he’s read my mind. “Chrissakes,” I whisper to him. “My money puts food on that woman’s table.”
“Miss Janet says y’all are moving on next week,” Caroline says. “Guess I was lucky to find you.”
August, missing somehow that this situation isn’t a polite one, walks over to shake her hand. “Nice to meet you.”
“Well, you too! We were all wondering what kind of boy Audrey went off and married. You know, them people back in Mt. Sterling always did think I must’ve been something special, just ’cause I was walking down the street with Audrey Martin. I’m supposing that’s true for you, too?”
I’m leaning a hip on Janet’s icebox, keeping an eye on Caroline, who looks, sunk in the middle of Janet’s dress, like a child playing house. “One tablespoon vanilla, a half teaspoon nutmeg,” Janet whispers to herself, as she bends over and peers into the exact middle of her cookbook, whose essential pages are marked with cuts of ribbon.
“Why are you here?” I ask Caroline.
She looks in my eyes as though she’s expecting to meet someone she’s never known. “Everbody deserves a vacation,” she says.
“You couldn’t run down to Lake Barkley?”
“Whatever,” she says, chewing.
“Well,” Janet says, as though our conversation is causing her physical pain.
“May I help with the food?” I ask her.
“You know nothing about food. Get out of here.”
The Outer Banks’ best treasures wash up after a rain, so August goes out beachcombing for horseshoe crabs and moon jellies. Caroline and I watch from the edge of Janet’s back porch as he disappears down the shore, letting the brown foam of the tide wet the cuffs of his pants. He skips deep footprints into the sand, but as soon as he’s left a trail of six or seven, the tide comes to erase his evidence.
“Think he’ll find anything?” I ask Caroline. She’s leaned forward with her palms turned in against Janet’s porch, swinging her legs in the empty space beneath.
“I don’t know, but he sure is getting black out there in all that sun.”
“Really, what are you doing here?”
“Years, you been bothering me to visit. Now I’m here, where’s your sense of hospitality? You don’t,” she says, sliding off the porch, setting a line of determination into the side of her mouth, “know how to treat people.”
“I’m sorry, Caroline. All I ever wanted to tell you was that I’m sorry.”
She waves a hand at me, says, “To hell with that.” She kicks off her shoes and runs down the shore after August, running until she disappears, about a mile away, and then all I have are her poor orphaned shoes, lying atop the sand. I feel silly looking after them, so I drift back inside, where Janet has come out of the kitchen to let pots boil. She’s up on a ladder now, cleaning the three triangular windows that form a semicircle in her lintel. She puts all her upper arm strength into wiping, and comes away with a year’s worth of hardened crust.
“Can I help with that, at least?”
“I’ve told you once—get out.”
She’s blocking the door with her ladder, so I have to swing it right into her—not hard enough to upset anything, but she does flinch in anticipation of falling. On her porch, sunlight shears a sheet of pain across my eyes and I slam her door back closed, with enough force that it makes the loose four in her house number rattle. I’m down her front steps, then, and into the strangest fog: the post-rain sun glows orange through the haze that has erased rooftops and porches. Even the next house over is invisible, but birds still call. Always, down here, the birds call—they’re twenty-four-hour maniacs. A length of wind comes, smelling of Pookie’s hair pomade, and I think I’m going mad as a plover, but then who’s to say this one square inch of wind hasn’t blown right through her on its way up the beach? Who’s to say it doesn’t pick up the scent of her, the new sadness in the hollow of her neck, and bring it here to reproach me? We’ve been friends for more than a decade now: I might have welcomed her. I might simply have laughed at her joke about August, and made everything all right between us. But there’s a new, hard thing. An impossibility between us that I hadn’t seen until we were standing beside the pool table together, with soda bubbling all around our feet. The thought brings tears to my eyes, and I have to get myself off Janet’s sidewalk.
With the general store closed, the butcher’s and the bait store locked up, the crowds of this town have nowhere to spend their money on a Sunday but the corner greengrocer’s. Behind his back, they call him a heathen for changing money on a Sunday, and yet he does enough business that he doesn’t have to come out again until Wednesday. I’ve seen them lined down our street, the men and children sent out by the mothers on their day of rest, and among them I know I’ll be safe, with no one asking me whether I don’t belong to anyone, not one of these strangers caring a whit whether I’ve been loved. I breathe more fog, searching for another pocket of Caroline, but she isn’t there. In the corner of the shop, I handle the lemons up from Florida, drop them in their bucket—three beats in an uneven tempo—and wonder how I might put them to use.
When I get back to the house, Caroline and August are back from their walk and sitting in Janet’s living room, Caroline beaming, August looking terribly unhappy. “I need to refresh myself,” she says, and skips off to the bathroom. August has three shells in his lap—he’s picked the most unusal ones—one spotted like a dalmation, one fragile and uneven with a striated underbelly, one bluish and shaped like a miniature conch. “Ain’t no money in
shells,” Sanders told him once. “Peoples is laughing at you all up and down the beach.” Coming from a man whose entire livelihood is junk, this seemed absurd. Now, August rolls his eyes toward the bathroom. “Folks really speak that way where you come from?”
I giggle. “It’s a miracle I wear shoes.”
“She’s so loud. And was pulling up her bra straps while I was talking to the Baptist Reverend. And she passed gas. More than once. It smelled like the sewer. And then she told me you always did want to marry into money.”
“What?”
“She said you wrote her a letter and told her you snagged a rich one.”
“It’s a lie. I can’t even imagine why she’d tell you that, but it’s a lie.”
Caroline runs from the bathroom with a yelp and I follow her into my and August’s room, where she falls back on the bedspread and starts fingering the grooves in the chenille. “This is right fun,” she says. “Is this what you’ve been up to?”
“We work all night,” I say.
“Shoot. You don’t know what work is. And try raising a young’un all by your lonesome on top of it.”
“I’m sorry about Miss Myrtle.”
“Well, I’ll be damned if it didn’t take you long enough to say so.”
“By my reckoning, Imagene just turned eleven. If you’ve run off on her account, you’re having an awfully delayed reaction.”
“She’s still a child. And she still needs protecting. And my daddy’s back in town, and it’s a mountain of work just keeping her away from him. Come Mama’s birthday, here he was putting flowers on her grave when we come up the hill. I had to beat him off like a crow.”
Such an image it is, Sonnyboy with his prison-grayed hair, hobbling up the hill to pay his respects, only to be beaten back by his own kin. And so confusing to remember Mauris’s funeral, all the spiritual energy spent on her soul’s ascendance, only to have those left behind become consumed with her body’s physical location.
“Let’s get back to why you’re here.”
“Just came to see you. Ain’t it okay to visit a body?”
That evening, Janet returns home and starts heating up the dinner she’s made. She has a big floppy bow across the top of her dress—always she is thus decorated in her war of femininity, with big floppy bow or lace drawstring, as though her entire wardrobe is aimed at gating off whatever sexual suggestion exists beneath her neck—and though the bow points up happily, her mouth now does not. She sets a soufflé on her long cherry table, then follows up with a basket of bread and a dish of candied beets, pork chops, some sweet corn casserole, and creamed spinach. “Have a seat, y’all,” she says. The table seems awkward and false, the four of us with such different agendas. But after several lost starts having to do with the sinking of the Yancey Street pier, Janet sends us on a rhythm with the week’s best town gossip, including her own annotated history of the White preacher’s wife and her accidentally Cherokee baby. “She might’ve known he’d come out too dark to pass,” Janet says. “Salt and pepper don’t mix back into salt.”
Caroline hums while she chews, gnaws the last flashes of meat off her pork chop and sucks the marrow out of its bone. She starts in licking her index finger and Janet squirms. August pats his own hand. When Caroline puts her elbows on the table, Janet puts her own elbow in the air and makes a big show of brushing it off. When she tells a joke about St. Paul at the pearly gates, Janet points out how inappropriate on a Sunday. When she speaks of the weather back in Mt. Sterling, Janet says she can only imagine the bugs and the heat. And of course Janet meets everything I say, even my compliments on her sweet tea, with a pursing of her already sour mouth. She’s like a show dog with a bark for every occasion, her red bow hiding the parts of her that might move.
“How long have you two been married?” she asks us, trying to forget about Caroline.
“Since the end of January,” Caroline answers for us. “Her mama like to die over it.”
“How’d you meet?” she asks.
“At work.” August chews hatefully. “At the Apollo.”
“Ahh,” Janet says. “Love at first sight.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” says August, and without chewing, I swallow a hunk of sweet bread. “If I’d seen her walking down the street, I might not have looked twice. Hell, it took me about a week just to understand what she was saying.” With one of Janet’s crisp white napkins, he dabs his chin, missing altogether the shiny veneer of pork chop grease slicking his lips, and it makes me think of all the ways he’s never been careful.
“You can’t be serious,” I say.
“I cain’t,” he says, making his “a” long, and Janet laughs.
“Different backgrounds, naturally,” says Janet.
“Different planets,” August says. He smiles at me, the same smug smile a boy might give to his dog after he’s tricked it into licking its private parts. “I find it amazing I ever met such a person.”
He’s said this to me before—once, on a city bus, as he rubbed the place between my third and fourth fingers, smoothing out a kink of muscles worn to fury by the night’s long performance. Once, he said it to me as we sat down to a meal at Velvet’s. He’d looked toward the door one last time, because we’d been waiting for Mr. and Mrs. John Tilghman, old friends of his to whom I’d later be introduced as “the backbone of the band.” Not seeing them then, he’d looked around Velvet’s great high-ceilinged dining room, at all those Negroes, not one table of them worth less than a quarter of a million dollars, and then back at me, at the thin shoulders of my old silk blouse. “I find it amazing I ever met such a person,” he’d said, and his words had warmed me on such a cold, snowy night.
Now, his words cut me open. They’re the words of a classically trained violinist married, out of unplanned need, to a girl who grew up playing church songs by ear. The words of a boy from the better end of 138th Street run smack into a girl from the cowpath. Janet’s left her kitchen window open, but so long after the heat of her cooking, it’s cause for a draft. August’s words sound like the words of someone who’s run upon a rare breed of goat, or a new old world monkey. A sip of sweet tea doesn’t send my bread down: it won’t go anywhere. The lump my feelings are making in my throat is pushing it right back up.
“She thinks she’s so smart, but she’s so tiresome she got to go and write my life into a song. She’s lucky she met you,” Caroline says. “You know, her mama’s a drunk.”
“What’s this about?” Janet asks, her pupils as wide and black as a shark’s.
“Audrey’s mama. Everbody in town knows it. Did you know it, August? Ain’t you met that lady? You know, Poindexter’s sitting here trying to act right cute, but she’s really just like me—she’s just from a fancier part of the street. Don’t mean she ain’t got a outhouse. It means her outhouse was decorated.”
Silence, then, and I look to my plate, wishing the corn would roll into a demonically possessed pattern on its own accord, or the bread would jump up and dance—anything to turn off the horrible echo of what Caroline’s just said. She gets up and shoves her white napkin into her plate, right into the candied beets. The stain will never wash out; no matter how many times Janet hangs it in the sun to bleach it will still be there, bleeding. “You might think you’re the only one what can embarrass a body, but you got another think coming,” she says, and she walks out Janet’s foyer and slams the door even harder than I did this morning, so hard the ceramic angel falls from the wall and breaks.
“Why, she didn’t even taken her dessert,” Janet says, more quietly than I’ve ever heard her say anything.
August and I watch the little hand on Janet’s clock make its revolutions. Four minutes pass, and a fifth reaches its middle before Janet leaves the table and we hear her in the parlor, blowing her nose. She’s left her high heels in the foyer, it seems, and in her stockinged feet she brings the biggest pieces of her angel to the kitchen, sets them on the counter, and proceeds to serve her final course. It’s stunnin
g—a key lime pie whose icy surface is broken with perfectly squeezed florets of cream. A slice of lime twisted across the middle of each piece, and I don’t know when she’s had time to go to the greengrocer’s. A perfect dessert, but like everything else in life, never meant for everyone at the table.
WRECKING BALL
I’m on Janet’s couch, dreaming about the telephone, when it rings. “I want to speak to my son,” she says.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Barnes, but he’s out for the morning.”
“Out where? Where could he have got to at seven in the morning?”
“Fishing.”
It’s true: August has gone native on us, with a straw sunhat, a long rod, and a reel that looks like the barrel of a gun, a Fred Arbogast Jitterbug on the end for bait. He’s out every day before the sun, even when we’ve gone to bed at two. You’d think I’d sleep through his leaving by now, but I don’t. It hurts enough to wake me every time.
“Fishing?”
“Yes, ma’am. He catches quite a bit, actually.”
“All my son’s going to catch out there is a cold.” She herself clears some phlegm in her throat. “I should think you’d be able to keep him in, mornings.”
“Well, he is a grown man.”
On her end of the line I hear the faintest music, a rising and falling of delicate chimes like the movement of a music box. He hurts me, this son of hers, so much. I don’t have the netting to hold it all in, and the sad, sticky gum of it comes spilling out of me at the craziest times: he drinks a bottle of Bolt’s Seltzer and I want to press his forehead to mine and kiss him; he writes a figure in his bankbook and I want to take him to the hard bed we’re renting, lay him down on Janet’s bleached sheets, watch him beg. He buttons his overcoat and I want to drown in him.
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