Pages for You

by Sylvia Brownrigg

  Flannery hoped, painfully. She tossed in restless, guessing doubt. And somewhere under the scald and the referred anger (Anne was the one who had planned this damned trip to this ridiculous state; and by the way, why had she failed to give Flannery the sunblock?)—somewhere under there, Flannery sensed, ingenue though she was, that this tension might not be in the normal run of a long-lasting love.

  Something was wrong.

  They drove. It can be a cure-all: the eating of miles can satisfy a hunger other foods cannot.

  Flannery drove first, to atone (for what?), or at least to bring the softer curves of tolerance back to Anne’s sharp-lined face. They did not speak. Flannery tried the radio, but the fuzzy sound of outdated hits filled the car with even more tense static, and soon she spun the knob back. Off; silence. It was the better position for them just now.

  After a couple of hours, Flannery admitted, in an embarrassed mutter, that the pain was unbearable and she would have to find lotion, so they broke off from the road at a sprawling shopping center. In a vast sell-all drugstore Flannery found three kinds of after-sun care while Anne stocked up on tapes, mostly of country-and-western compilations, which were to become the sound track of their uncomfortable journey. They went for a late breakfast at a Shoney’s, a place Flannery translated to herself as the Denny’s of the South—it had similar bright colors and that open, booth-easy layout. She and her mother used to make runs to Denny’s for pancakes, and the place made her homesick for that loved person she had paid so little attention to lately. Her mother. How was she? Flannery ought to send her a postcard. “Guess what! I’m in Florida. A friend and I are driving around, having a great time . . .”

  Wordless, the women ate their breakfast. Flannery gained solace from a stack of pancakes smothered in syrup and thoughts of her mother, while Anne dryly crunched her way through crisp bacon and toast. Finally Flannery excused herself from her uncompanionable companion and took her gels and creams to the bathroom, where, with a few minutes to herself, she broke down and cried. Her flesh made her wince and dehydration pounded her head, and she succumbed to an underslept panic that she had, for no obvious reason, become insufferable to her own adored girlfriend.

  “Oh, honey.” A waitress in a corn-yellow uniform and hair to match came out of one of the stalls and looked at Flannery in the fluorescent-lit mirror with a lipsticked frown of imagined pain. “That is a bad burn. Look at you, you poor little thing.” The you was a long ewe, a drawn-out taffy sound, sweet with sympathy. Flannery wanted to embrace her for it with her flame-skinned arms.

  “I forgot the sunblock,” she sniffed, unafraid now, away from Anne, to sound like the dumb kid she was.

  “People do it all the time. They just forget how strong that sun can be. Have you tried butter?”

  Flannery shook her head. “I’ve got all these creams . . .”

  The waitress shook her high head as she checked her hair in the mirror. “Don’t use those, honey. Try butter. It sounds crazy, but it’s very soothing. I swear by a little butter on a bad burn. And you be careful—stay out of the daylight, it will only make it hurt worse.”

  Flannery thanked her, cleared up her tears, and returned to the table feeling better. At least she had an ally now against the punishing sun. When Anne went to the register to pay the check, Flannery grabbed a fat handful of butter pats and put them into her bag. She planned to try the waitress’s trick later on, when Anne wasn’t watching. She would be bound to laugh.

  But in all that followed, of course, Flannery forgot about the butter. So that another legacy of their blighted vacation was a series of books marked with translucent pages from the melting butter’s calming, widespread salve.

  From the fast unhappy car, Flannery saw silver. By the roadside. A still, mournful huddle of luminous fur. But large: person-sized, legend-sized, not the dimension of some poor dog or possum.

  “Wait. Slow down. Do you see that?’

  “What?” Anne kept driving. She slowed down, fractionally.

  “Slow down! Wait. Did you—” Flannery craned her head back, chafing her chest against the seatbelt. “Ouch—shit. Did you see that?”

  “What?’

  Eyeless and soulless as far as Flannery could tell, behind the sunglasses. Mouth unmoved. Skin smooth, soft, lightly tan: flawless.

  “Are you even in there anymore?” Flannery wondered, under her breath.

  That got Anne’s attention.

  “What did you say?” The car slowed, but it was too late now. Her voice was dangerous. “What did you say to me?”

  “Why didn’t you stop?”

  “For what? You didn’t say what you saw.”

  “Because it was so sad and awful.” Flannery, as a kind of rebellious statement, took her own sunglasses off. She squinted sorely into the unforgiving sky that waited at the end of this straight, Everglade-edged road.

  “Well, what was it?” Anne sped back up.

  “Never mind.”

  “Don’t be childish, Flannery. What was it?”

  She sighed. “A panther.”

  “What do you mean, a panther?”

  “A silver panther. Dead. By the side of the road.”

  “No.” But she was impressed; almost willing to believe. “I don’t think that’s possible. What did it look like?”

  “It was terrible. I don’t want to talk about it.” Flannery knew perfectly well that such withholding really did seem childish. But she was not keeping quiet out of a pouting, kidlike retribution. That dead silver body had filled her stomach with a genuine ill ease and a hollow feeling of loss. You did not have to be Florida-tolerant, as Flannery still wasn’t, to figure out that such panthers were rare, that their numbers could not afford to be lowered by impatient, speeding vacationers. It was all wrong. But this was, in the silent car, unsayable. Newly shy Flannery was not tempted to explain the shape of this grief to the unmovable driver beside her.

  The Everglades were unfathomable, eerie and steam-jungled, a natural riot unlike any western wildness Flannery had trekked through. In the Everglades she calmed down. They both did. It shut them both up, dwarfing their trivial disagreements as the planet’s magnitudes sometimes can. (Who were they to bicker when all this was going on around them?) The Everglades made Flannery stop talking about Florida’s ugly tackiness long enough to realize the place contained worlds inventive beyond Disney and shows more daring than Ringling’s greatest on earth: that this state’s heart was much darker and more interesting than she had, in her ignorance, believed. This was someplace worth getting to. It was worth the sunburn and brain fever; it might even be worth the inevitable heartache. Not that the heartache had arrived yet. It was to come.

  And the Everglades were the first substance successful in soothing Flannery’s sore skin. The sultry moisture of the place embraced her in something uncannily like comfort. Uncanny, because Flannery felt sure there were creeping disasters hidden in the swampy woods—not only in the shape of the hardly credible gators.

  They walked. Starting at a tourist information panel near the parking lot, which listed the creatures and greeneries that raced through the strange Everglades. It was near a creek where a mother alligator and her brood dog-paddled photogenically. The women were helpless to find the baby alligators anything but adorable. Their not quite rough hides glistened a wet, dangerous jade that Flannery recognized as the color of those eyes that did not, just now, seem able to meet hers. But the whole landscape was rich in that familiar Anne color, the color of jealousy: all their surroundings seemed to be one insidious green or another. Sparse woods, but not as Flannery knew woods. Hers were pine and redwood and dry, or if not dry, then full of the thick yeast of fog. These woods were stooped, saturated with an unfamiliar atmosphere, and oozing with life forms unlike anywhere else. Flannery, generally unsuperstitious, felt ghosts hover over her flesh, and even Anne—rational, hard-minded Anne—looked spooked. She took off her sunglasses, at last, and let the mysteries in. And for that one act, that brie
f baring of soul, Flannery again loved her and loved Florida and felt, for the first time since the burn, the prickly inklings of desire.

  On a dark path, they embraced. Flannery wore cheap turquoise shorts she had bought as a joke back in Sarasota and a long tank top that yawned lazily over her lean frame. Anne, who always knew better, was in one of her crisp white T’s and denim shorts that would have looked boyish or butch on a less feminine body. Flannery loved her that way: tough girl, a bit of swagger on the outside, and all girl, all softness, just underneath. That was Anne all over.

  “Come here.” Flannery breathed in an air that hummed with multiplications of flora and fauna.

  “I am here.” Anne slid her tongue into Flannery’s ear to prove it, and sidled up even closer. What a relief, to have shed their recent dislike and suspicion. Here they were: back. Relieved Flannery containing her Anne; relaxed Anne editing her Flannery. She put a light finger on Flannery’s lips. “Does it hurt a lot?” It was the first time she had acknowledged the affliction as anything other than Flannery’s irritating fault.

  “It hurts,” Flannery said in a hushed voice. “But it hurts so good.”

  “Ooh, baby,” Anne hushed back. “As Murphy might say.” She urged her smile onto Flannery’s.

  “Mmm” was all Flannery could manage to that, before she let herself swallow and give way. Kissing, in any case, was only good, as Flannery’s mouth was unscarred by the sun. And kissing remained an index of their proximity: the two women could not kiss unless their spirits were close, and when there was distance between them their mouths avoided each other. They had kissed maybe once or twice since the morning they’d first boarded the train. There was always the excuse—as there is, between two women tempting fate with this kind of adventure—that, unless they were deeply barricaded and private, people might see and react badly. Yet all through Anne and Flannery’s long hot winter they had risked ice kisses and snow melts out on the town’s streets. Anne more than Flannery had proved willing to take chances in late courtyards or in underlit corners of paths; Flannery had fretted, at times, and Anne had kissed away her fears. But this day, Evergladed, it was Flannery whose hands were bolder. They started to move into areas that, in shorts, were easily accessed.

  Anne gasped at her touch. “What are you doing?” she said in a shocked whisper, but the thrilled clutch of her nails against Flannery’s back told her she knew perfectly well what Flannery was doing. And did not object.

  “I want you,” Flannery murmured, as if the want were not obvious. Her fingers found what they were looking for, and the two women became, temporarily, one.

  Which was the shape they were found in by the young honeymooners who just then rounded the path.

  “Oh my God” was the simultaneous exhalation of the two unhappy couples, who wished, too late, that they had not seen or been seen. If only we had not looked. If only we had not happened to be here—now.

  What could anyone do? It was an impossible embarrassment all around.

  Flannery did what she could: wrapped her arms entirely around Anne in an effort to hide her, then buried her own face in Anne’s soft neck so she would not have to read the couple’s expressions. It was she, Flannery, who faced them. Anne’s back was to the pair, so all she had to go by was their sound of alarm and the sudden rigidity of Flannery’s body.

  “What the hell—?” the man said. He, of the two, was not inclined to stop looking.

  “Come on, honey,” said his mate, urging him on. Perhaps this was one of a series of efforts to lead him past his anger: Flannery opened her eyes just enough to see the woman’s nervous, haunted eyes. “Let’s go. Let’s just go.”

  “What the hell do you think—”

  “Come on.” Desperation, or disgust, must have made her strong, as she succeeded in pulling the hulking man away. They moved into the woods in a tight alliance of stunned dismay, throwing back words that reached the two women’s ears with a sting.

  “. . . Shameless . . . Did you see . . . ? . . . Indecent . . . Freaks.” They stood clinging to each other on their sinking ship. The heat of intimacy gone, doused by the dampness of shamed humiliation and the thwarted violence that goes with it. Flannery found herself wanting to hit Anne, or bite her. The feeling was probably mutual.

  It is an old story. One of the oldest. They would not have had to travel so far just to learn it: Lust—open, naked lust—must be named and punished. How else can we hope to keep the world in order?

  Their conversation was dead, and a spring storm was coming. Clouds scowled overhead to remind them to get back to their car, as if they weren’t going there already. Anything for self-protection, to cover themselves back up after the exposure of their sin.

  They could neither look at nor speak to each other, which made it hard to work out how to proceed. Anne finally drove back into town, leaving Flannery at a diner where she could order grits. In the absence of Pop-Tarts, grits seemed the closest she would find to comfort food. Anne intended to drive around looking for a place for them to stay that night. They both could use some time on their own.

  Flannery filled hers with reading. It was her time-tested response to crisis. She let Intro to Drama drive Florida and its demons out of her head. I am not here, she told herself calmly. I am sitting near a bare tree, waiting for Godot. “In spite of the tennis . . .” she mumbled aloud, after Lucky. “Tennis of all sorts.” A pompous, acne-scarred boy in her class had pronounced the play “a boil on the face of literature,” which was bound to make Flannery read it with even more sympathy. Hers was the kind of university where eighteen-year-olds were proud to issue such commentaries. Flannery had to hope that she would not, in her four years, learn to speak similarly.

  It was not easy to take herself out of the warm-voiced diner, full of group tables of sleepy tourists and solitary fish-skinned natives, and out into the spare-worded landscape of Beckett, but Flannery tried. She bummed a cigarette off a mascaraed, sun-leathered older woman with a wide swoop of an accent, and that somehow helped. By the time Anne came back, almost two hours later, Flannery was so deep in the text’s elements and the comic despair of existence, that she was practically in Paris. En attendant Godot. Where she ought to have been now, anyway. Where this springtime, by rights, she belonged.

  Anne came back to Flannery changed, and thwarted.

  “Sorry I took so long. I had to make a couple of phone calls.” She sat down, shifting in her clothes, as if they no longer fit her. She ordered a coffee. “Anyway. No luck on accommodation. It’s the same problem as before: the motels have no vacancies, and the hotels are too damned expensive.” She pulled out a cigarette and, seeing the butt in the ashtray, offered one to Flannery without comment. It seemed a peace offering. Flannery took it. Her mouth already had the taste of a crematorium.

  “That’s all right.” Flannery had, in the course of her long wait, taken on an existential resignation. Ça, ne fait rien. “No big deal.”

  “Do you want to drive farther? It might get less crowded if we head south.”

  “No. Let’s not worry about it.” Flannery nodded down at the book. “After all, we give birth astride a grave, so what’s the difference?”

  “Oh.” Anne’s eyes, seeing the cover, flickered to life. “Is that the first time you’re reading it?”

  “Of course.” Flannery smoked with ridiculous, staged exuberance. “It’s my first time for everything. First time in Florida—”

  “Mine too.”

  “First time eating grits. Second, if you count Amtrak.”

  “Which I don’t. I’m sure it was Cream of Wheat, trying to pass.”

  “First time”—Flannery lowered her voice—“getting caught having sex in a public place.”

  Anne winced. “Mine too.”

  “Really? With all your worldly experience?”

  “With all my worldly experience. Believe it or not.” But Anne was back now; back enough to talk to Flannery again. “You know, babe, there’s an added plot twist here. A
storm is coming.”

  “I know. I’ve been hearing all about it from the people in here.” By now Flannery was unstoppably punchy. “But that’s no surprise, is it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, obviously it’s the wrath of God coming down on our heads. For our sin against nature.”

  “Oh.” Anne’s hard, perfect lips finally broke into the tiniest smile. Her brow lifted slightly. “You think?”

  “Sure. Come on, sweetheart. Let’s go watch.” Flannery threw down a bill for her long breakfast and several coffees. “I bet you’ll blush all over when it comes.”

  Parked at one edge of the world, they took in the performance. It was all about the elements, and in this way not so different from what Flannery had just been reading. A different cast, though. For Gogo and Didi Flannery read the troubled companionship of sky and water, with comic or painful relief provided by the wind brutally whipping the abject, mute trees. In spite of the tennis.

  “It’s not a hurricane,” Anne clarified, to reassure them both. “It’s the wrong season.”

  “So does it have a name? Don’t they name them?”

  “No, only hurricanes get names. And maybe tropical storms, too.”

  “Murphy,” Flannery suggested. “‘Tropical storm Murphy hit the Everglades today . . .’”

  Anne looked out at the wet rage. “That Murphy,” she said. “He is nothing but trouble. It was all his fault, if you remember. The shameful Park Incident.”

  “Absolutely. He was egging us on. ‘Go, girls. I’ve got the cameras rolling. Go at it!’”

  “Don’t.” Anne hid her eyes with her hands, though her voice still held some humor. “That huge man. Awful. Calling usfreaks.” She kept her face hidden.