by Diane Munier
“And there’s you,” Mama said.
“There is nothing between us. Least ways from me. I have forgiven you way back. And I have asked you repeatedly to forgive me.”
“I don’t hold it against you. I told you that,” Mama said. “One for the other.”
“That is the cruelest way to put it. That is not what it was.”
“But that don’t mean it didn’t happen.”
“We have put it back there,” Naomi said.
“But it happened. It all happened.”
“I have never denied that.”
“But you have denied me. You can barely look at me.”
“I have done right by you. I have always done right by you.”
“I gave you her. I let you have her,” Mama said.
“That was not decision. That was apathy.”
“You have not forgiven me. I know you want to think you have so you can get at that pulpit and be the righteous one. But you have not forgiven me.”
“I have given you everything,” Naomi said.
“You have given me everything but your forgiveness.”
“I have given you…everything. Now you go to God like I always say. You go to him and get what you need. For I am empty.”
I stumbled from there, two hands over my mouth, I walked but I didn’t know where I was going. I turned a corner and saw the outside doors ahead and I walked toward them, I ran too.
Outside I leaned against the wall and I breathed and I felt the sun on my face. And everything I knew, every rough and dusty edge I’d ever touched…was truth shrouded by Mama…by Naomi. They hardly ever talked, they didn’t talk. They didn’t fight. They didn’t argue. They were around me. They were with me. But they were not together. And yet they were tied. By more than me. They were locked. Mama counted on Naomi and Naomi was true. But the others…the others were there before me. And the way they had spoken to one another, not just the words but the emotion in the words, the knowing in the words….
I could barely understand why or how, but the purple car was there, and Danny leaning toward the passenger side talking to me through the open window. “Get in,” he said.
I made a sound I was so grateful. I did not know it was him I needed…that God would give me such a gift when I was toes over a cliff, looking down and wondering how deep the black hole was.
So I got in, and he looked at me in all his handsome glory and he grinned. And I knew that somehow it would be all right, that somehow I would live through it all.
“I tried to go to work,” he said, “but Lonnie is still at your house and Robert ain’t there either and it’s all locked up.”
I didn’t think about it I just leaped across the space between us and put my arms around his neck and I squeezed, and he laughed a little and his arms went around me and he squeezed me back until there was a knocking on the door and a man’s voice said, “Hey you can’t park here,” and I pulled back and Danny ignored him and said, “Where you want to go?”
And I said, “With you.”
Finding My Thunder 9
He’d said. “Let’s go to the quarry.” And I did not protest as we headed out of town. This was his place, this quarry, he owned it all, this town, these places where his every move made the legends they would talk about all the rest of the week, Danny Boyd was the thing we got right, the hero amongst us.
The windows were down and the hot wind blew our hair, and I was turned toward him and the Moody Blues blasted from an eight track tape. And I was looking at him and when he’d look back I would smile and so would he.
We didn’t talk about anything. We didn’t need to. He knew I was in the shit…I knew he was drifting toward a war. I let the million knocks on the door of my mind go still and my guilt for feeling comfort with Danny, not take hold. I was with him and for just a few hours I would pretend it was real because that’s how it felt…real.
So we got there, crunching gravel under our tires and he knew where to park, knew it all slamming the car into gear, tearing the door open, trunk open and him digging and I got out more slowly cause we were high and the water was low, and he was back there talking. “Don’t come around less you want to see something,” he laughed.
And when he slammed that trunk I got slammed with him in cut-off jeans and not anything else.
“You come prepared,” I said.
“Long as I got my skin I’m ready for the quarry,” he said.
I didn’t know what to say to that. Of course he would swim bare with his friends, but I was me and…not ready.
But following him it was hard not to ogle his back and shoulders, hips and legs, Lord, and him brown as when he was young. Naomi called him that, and he was, and it ran through.
So I followed him to the lookout and sat on the ground and he ran for it and jumped into the air and I was on my feet watching him fall like the most free and beautiful thing God ever made. And he hit the pure blue water and bobbed up quick, his dark head slick as a seal’s and he was hooting, “Come on.”
“Oh shit,” I whispered. “Over-thinker,” I called to him.
“What? Get down here.” He was treading water.
“I don’t swim.” And I was afraid of heights and afraid in general.
“Come on,” he said. “I’ll get you. Jump.”
I stepped back. Thank God I had on cut-offs. I could easy go in my T-shirt, but no. If I was going to do this I wanted to be free. I was far enough back he couldn’t see. I pulled off my T-shirt and stood there in my white bra with the little flower in the center. I was a Baptist freak thanks to Naomi so the bra stayed.
“Get down here,” he called again.
It was the age of peace and love. I’d always known if I ever got a chance to be a part of it I’d be a lily-livered sexually inhibited…I bet Tahlila peeled off. And she was a jock.
Well, damn it.
“Come on, girl,” he called.
And I kicked off my shoes and walked out where he could see me.
He was quiet, looking up, arms moving.
After a minute he said, “Go back and run and jump. I’ll be right here.”
I nodded, and I took some steps back. Worst that could happen? I would die. Either way I’d be in Danny’s arms the other end of this.
So I took a big breath. I ran toward the edge and got there and kept going. My arms went out and my fingers spread and the water grew close and a flash of Danny and I hit the water and cold. So cold as I plunged letting the rush fold me like a shut flower. It was good not to fight.
But as I slowed my petals started to open and I kicked up. He grabbed me and he was moving strong and I continued to rise. He had my arm and he pulled me, but I kicked too. In seconds we broke the surface.
He gasped and so did I. “You did it,” he said soft and proud.
I put my arms around his neck and his arms were around me as his strong legs kicked.
“You looked like an angel,” he said.
He was so kind and so lovely and strong.
He turned me around then and put his arm under my breasts and he was swimming and pulling me along, and I looked at the sky so blue, so blue. He’d been proud of me jumping like that when I was scared. But I wasn’t scared. Not right this minute I wasn’t at all.
After a minute he said, “That’s it, just float like that…like that.”
And my eyes were closed and the heat of the sun on my face, and his hands holding me, but the water around me, and I floated and it was so quiet, so quiet, and I felt Danny beneath me, his legs lightly touching my own, then gone, then back. And for a long time we did that, we floated and we breathed and the water…the water…like a cloud…like something joined by God…no fear…so safe…like one.
Finding My Thunder 10
I was back at the hospital the same time they were trying to serve Mama lunch. Naomi was trying to get her to take a bite of tapioca. She stood by the bed speaking to Mama like she was a baby. Mama ignored her, face turned away, eyes closed.
> “Look at you,” Naomi said to me.
After my plunge into the quarry Danny had taken me home and I had put my wet hair in a ponytail and changed my clothes. I’d also put some things in a paper bag so I could spend the night with Mama. Lonnie had not been home. That meant we had pretty much raced here so Danny could work for the rest of the day.
I didn’t expect Lonnie to come. Not until he had to and maybe not even then.
“Did the doctor get in to see her?” I asked.
“Go home,” Mama said, her eyes still closed.
“You got color in your cheeks,” Naomi addressed me moving to the chair. “Do you want to eat this food?”
“No thank you,” I said.
“Naomi pulled her crochet up from where it sat bundled on the top of her big purse. It was in baby colors.
“What did the doctor say?” I asked.
Naomi shook her head at me with a sorrowful smile. I already knew there was no hope.
So I went to the other chair in the room and sat, placing my paper bag on the floor beside.
“They took an x-ray but she will not be put through anymore tests. She is on a lot of medication for pain,” Naomi said.
Naomi fussed at her stitches and then in disgust she unraveled some.
“I don’t think Lonnie will come around,” I said.
“Leave him alone,” Mama slurred, not opening her eyes. “He’s no good.”
Naomi looked at me. She said, “Come on out in the hall a minute.”
I followed her out to the hallway, waited while she spoke to an old man moving slow on a walker. You couldn’t go anywhere with Naomi she didn’t know everybody and their Mama.
“The x-ray showed how advanced. The doctor asked to use it at a convention. It is all throughout her Lymph System. It will be two, three weeks…or days,” she said to me with a sigh.
We kept walking toward a waiting room at the end of the hall.
“Does she know?” I said.
“I believe she does, Hilly. She knows she is dying.”
We could go no further and stood side by side at a picture window that looked onto a small patch of grass and some bushes.
I had a flash in my mind of when I was young and Mama had good times, strong times where she wore pretty aprons and I could smell the Breck shampoo in her thick shiny hair.
She was trying then, the last drop of hope had not left her yet…or maybe it had…maybe she got broke around the time Naomi’s husband died. Maybe they all did and I was just seeing the residue of what Mama could have been…what she was once.
“How old was she when she worked at the dimestore?”
Naomi looked at me. “I don’t remember. About your age when she started maybe…fifteen.”
“They told her she had talent. Artistic talent the way she set up the windows,” I said. “She was proud of that.”
We stood there quiet.
“Why you think she married him?” I asked.
“Guess she thought she loved him.”
“She said he looked handsome in his uniform,” I said.
“He did. He cut a fine figure. They didn’t have much time before he went to war.”
“Did she really know him?”
“I suppose she did. Well she had lost your Granma…and she was so lonely in that big house…and she had a girlfriend…and that one’s boyfriend was getting ready to go to the war…and he had a friend…it was Mr. Lonnie. And he was older than her…so that’s how it started.”
Mama had told me this, but I did not know she had been lonely then, too. But I did know she accused Lonnie of being after her money. Not that she had any now. But the big house must of fooled him.
“The war was hard on folks. People don’t come back the same.” Naomi said this last part low. I felt us walking on new ground together.
“Was she ever happy?”
She looked at me now and I saw the feeling there, always the sadness in her eyes. “How could she have such a daughter and not know happiness?”
If that was true, if I was the one supposed to have made her happy…then I knew firsthand I had failed. There were times when I was small…moments…seconds…but no, not happiness.
“You remember Lonnie much before he went to war?”
“Some.”
“What was he like then?”
She shrugged. “He kept to himself. He fixed radios.”
“He did?”
“They didn’t have long…not even a year before he left. They hardly had any time.”
“Were they happy? Like…in love?”
“Renata…she was always quiet. But after he left…she…she was lonely again. He…she had quit her job…he didn’t want her to work.”
“So what did she do all day?”
“She…I don’t know. It’s so long ago. She…she gardened some. She…painted.”
“Painted?”
“You ain’t seen her paintings? I don’t know what she done with them all. It’s so long ago.”
She was agitated, straightening up the waiting room. “I’m going to have to go for a bit. We are planning a service for the baby…and I got to rest.”
“You don’t have to come back today. I’ll call you,” I said.
Danny had told me to come to the parking lot when he got off of work. He said he wasn’t much good inside hospitals but he was great in parking lots. I smiled to myself remembering his words. And I told him he didn’t have to do that, he’d done too much already, but he ignored that and said he’d be round at five o’clock.
And I sat with Mama and she was already shifting away, turning away and looking to go. She didn’t talk to me or open her eyes much, but I put my hand on her leg sometimes, but I couldn’t keep her there.
At five I ran to the parking lot and the purple car was parked close to the front, but in a real spot this time. He was slumped in the seat smoking a cigarette and listening to music. I opened the passenger’s door and got in. “Hey,” I said, and he was sitting up from a drowsy place.
“You’re sunburned,” he said touching my cheek.
“You too,” but he wasn’t. He didn’t burn he just got brown.
“How you doin’?” he asked. “Hungry?”
“No,” I said. I didn’t think I’d ever eat again I felt so sick.
“Scoot over,” he said patting the seat beside him. So I did move over, and he put his arm around me and I put my head on his shoulder and it felt like Jesus had showed. I felt a block of sorrow move into my throat and I willed it back down cause it was too big and too much.
“He’s gonna pretty well stay drunk looks like,” Danny said, meaning Lonnie. “You want to take a ride?”
“I can’t leave her long.”
“We’ll ride to the bottoms and back. Twenty minutes.”
I went to scoot back to the door and he pulled my arm. “Where you goin’?”
So I gave in and he took his arm back, but I sat close to him while he drove us out of there.
I couldn’t think of a thing to say. I wasn’t light hearted like some girls, the girls he’d known. And now….
So we drove and he sang a little, and looked at me sometimes, but he only smiled a little. I sat there and absorbed him. That was what I wanted to do, tried to do. I didn’t ever want to leave him, leave this car, leave his side. “I wish we could go to Canada,” I said.
“What?” he asked reaching to turn down the radio.
I felt stupid now. “You don’t have to keep doing this.”
“What?”
“Being so nice.”
“Should I be mean?”
I laughed a little. “No.”
So we were quiet then, and too soon back at the hospital and fear and guilt speared me. What if she died while I was gone?
He pulled near the door and I scooted away and said, “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Danny…you can’t keep doing this. I’m…sorry I pulled you into all this.”
“
Hilly…I don’t do anything I don’t want to do.”
“Vietnam?” I said.
He kept staring at me, eyes with the dark pull.
“You want to go to Vietnam?” I repeated.
“We’re going to talk about this again?” He shook his head.
“I…don’t want you to go.” I had no right.
“If you wanted me to go…to a war…thousands of miles away…that would mean you hated my guts.”
“I…don’t hate your guts.”
“Good to know.”
I opened the door. “I…I don’t hate your guts,” I said again. “But…for so long…you ignored me.”
He shrugged. “See there…you’re wrong. There is no ignoring you. Not for me. Not ever.”
“You stopped talking to me on your thirteenth birthday. I was eleven. I brought you a cake. Sukey…and you and him fought. You told me…you said….” I finally heard myself, how loud my voice had grown and the emotion. I just stopped. I wasn’t fit to be around him. I felt like an idiot.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry. Just…you shouldn’t come back. I’m…I’m kind of a mess inside.”
I got out and closed the door. I heard his door slam and he called me. The guard was outside telling him he had to move his car. Danny cursed, but I heard him get back in his car and then I was inside. The nurse stopped me at her desk to explain Mama’s medication and as soon as she was done I turned to continue toward her room and Danny was there.
“Can I talk to you for a minute?” he asked.
He was still in his work clothes and pretty dirty, but beautiful to me.
“I…I guess so,” I said. We stepped a little ways down the hall and I leaned against the wall.
“I’m here now,” he said. “I don’t know how long I’ll be around and I never planned to do this…like thought it out…it just seems…right.”
“We were friends,” I said and I felt the tears, but I breathed slow and held them in check.
“That’s what we are,” he said.
“But all that time…I understand you went into sports and got all famous.”
He laughed at that.
“I mean…you wouldn’t look at me. You never did.”