“Gosh,” Hadley said. “It doesn’t take much to please you, does it?”
“Shoot. My own mother can’t even remember all their names.” She toasted him with her gin sour. “Speaking of my mother, she’s keeping the boys until tomorrow.”
Hadley had already made up his mind to get a T-bone, yet he stared at his menu as if the Spaghetti was tempting him, too. “I have to work in the morning, Vassie.”
“What time?”
“Six sharp.”
“So you’ll stay until five.”
He put down his menu. “I don’t know, Vassie.” It struck him that she wouldn’t be calling him the man of her dreams if she knew how wrapped up he still was with Lucinda.
“Do you like me?”
“Very much.”
“Then stay until five. I want to show you my laboratory.”
###
The lilac house smelled of flowers and dirty socks. Sock sweat hit one’s nose first. Honeysuckle followed. The front room had been girled up with lace doilies and a butter-colored love seat with pink fringy pillows. This was Vassie’s “shop”. Hadley had learned that the kitchen, bathroom, and bedrooms were fair game for anything, and thus the lot of were hopelessly littered with cap guns, crayons, hammers, and busted tire rims. But the shop was off limits. The boys had to come and go through the backdoor to keep down on the dirt.
Vassie had covered a gate-leg table with her mother’s needlepoint, and she displayed her soaps and perfumes in a pretty row on top. What made the place shine though were all the delicate little fineries she’d added. Fake pearls bumped against bottles of lemon yellow and baby pink glass. Vassie had snipped the pearls off a necklace her husband gave her on their first anniversary and put them to a better use. Likewise, she rescued bows off old shoes and lace trim from worn-out slips. Once, she’d come across a dress in a trashcan that had cigarette burns on the sleeves, and she salvaged three jewel buttons that later got glued on the lid of a hand cream jar. That same hand cream jar sold the next day for three pennies more than what she usually asked, and this was in no small part thanks to the buttons.
“There’s three of us in blackie town that put up perfume,” she told Hadley. “But I’m the only one to offer real jewel buttons on her lids.”
The front room was where Vassie conducted business. The cologne water was made elsewhere. She pulled a wooden ladder down from the second floor ceiling and led him up to the attic. Attics, as a rule, made Hadley nervous.
Up top, they stepped into a large room with a pyramid roof and an unfinished floor. A wall of boxes divided broken lamps, a crib, and Christmas lights from the heady heart of the Darratu operation.
No stench of socks prevailed here. It was pure verbena and lavender oil. On a sawhorse table, cardamom seeds and cloves soaked in saucers of rum. Tuberrose bathed in vodka. There were orris root for sashets and cinnamon sticks for smelling salts. Bacon Shampoo filled old syrup bottles. And along the windowsill, a line of colored jars lit up in the moonlight like stained glass, giving the place a strangely sacred feel.
“Most people don’t realize this, but making perfume is an art,” Vassie explained. “There’s some that think you just drop a few petals in some booze and away you go. Well, I’ve got news for those people: making perfume is every bit as complex as painting a picture of a meadow, only with perfume, scent is your paint brush. If you’re aiming to make a masterpiece, it’s real delicate work. Perfume is not about smelling like a rose. Just like a canvas ain’t never gonna be a meadow, a rose is always gonna do a better job of smelling like a rose than a person’s skin. Perfume is about the feeling a man gets when he touches his lips to a girl’s wrist.”
“It’s the same with gardening,” Hadley said. “No living person can touch what God does with flowers in the wild. If a man’s garden doesn’t stir up anything different when you look at it, then what’s it for?”
“It’s the language of flowers,” Vassie said.
Hadley nodded. This kind of talk was filling him with uncomfortable excitement. This was that moment, sometimes longed for, sometimes not, that happens every once in a great while between two people, like with Lucinda and books. Or Flora and everything. It was the sort of moment that can make even the most practical of men throw their lot in with fate, whole-heartedly accepting that there is something bigger at work than just the convenient happanstance of a waitress appearing with a pot of coffee when you’re in desperate need of a date.
Then again, maybe it was nothing special at all. Maybe everybody was the same, living one life on the outside of their skin, and a whole other life on the inside? The inner-most life of a life. Hadley was perfectly capable of sweating buckets and working his outside parts to blisters, while his inner book-obsesssed-self locked fingers with Fitzgerald’s Daisy and kissed her fickled lips. Whenever he mixed paint, there was a part of him scientifically tuned into measuring and stirring up the perfect shade of lavender, while another part set sail while dreaming of the dreams that might be dreamt up within those lavender walls. Maybe anytime you got close enough to scratch down to a person’s insides, there was always a special feeling for lavender going on in there? Don’t give her too much credit for liking flowers, he warned himself. Every girl likes flowers.
“Colors can work a spell on emotions, too,” Vassie said. Her fingers moved like dark magic wands over a row of mismatched china bowls. “I use tumeric for making yellow and dogwood for blue. Pokeweed makes a smokin’ shade of red. See all these sticks of weeping willow? They’re the secret behind my salmon-pink Kiss Behind the Earlobes.”
“I like colors,” Hadley said.
She handed him a little pillow made of softest leather. “Smell this.”
Hadley’s head went dizzy with the spicy scent of jasmine.
“A white woman from Long Street is paying me four dollars to make her a pair of pillows for the soles of her dancing shoes.”
“I never smelled jasmine-flavored feet before.”
She picked up a cotton handerchief. “I sell a shitload of these, too.” She waved the cheap fabric under his nose, and bergmot and lemon ran wild through his sinuses.
Hadley could hardly contain himself. “This is wonderful, Vassie.”
“But you still haven’t had a sniff of Darratu yet.”
“Maybe I have, and maybe I haven’t. How would I know?”
Vassie’s eyes twinkled. “You wouldn’t. But I never wear the stuff to get a man. Wearing Darratu when you’re courting would be like telling someone you have a million bucks saved under your mattress: how would you ever know if a person liked you for yourself or for your riches?”
“Then why do you make it?”
“Because there are plenty of woman out there who don’t give a damn why a man likes them. They just wanna be liked.”
There were times in his own life when he might have been tempted to sprinkle the stuff all over himself. Had he owned a bottle of Darratu when Nina was a baby, he’d have bathed in cologne water every day. Maybe Lucinda would have left Dickie, and they could have been a real family. “What does Darratu mean?”
“Blooming flower. It’s Ethiopian. If you want to make something bloom, it’ll cost you seventy-five cents.”
“What’s in it?”
She shook her finger. “That is a secret I’ve never told anyone.” The violet bottle of Darratu went back in its place. “Let’s move along, shall we?” She uncapped a jar of tiny crystals and poured some in his hand. “Until you’ve taken a bath in Vassie’s Sugar Soak, you haven’t taken a bath.”
“I haven’t?”
“Tastes good, too.”
Hadley clapped the sparkles off his palm. “I think it’s time for dessert.”
It was dawn by the time he walked up Treebourne Street, and the pastel rays of early light made the nipple-pink wisteria look pinker and nipplier than they’d ever looked before. He thought he saw a bedroom curtain tremble behind the reflection of pink blossoms, and he got a sudden urge to wave. He h
oped that Nina was hiding up there behind the lace, watching him through a lattice of diamond-shaped holes. He tugged at a vine and plunged his face into the cool, wet petals, confirming his theory that wisteria smelled softer and less intense before the heat of the day. Like a fresh pillowcase. Or a woman after a bath.
When he looked up from the flowers, Nina’s curtains were still. But the red drapes in another bedroom slowly opened down the middle.
###
Andrew, Atticus, Anthone, Amber, and Armstrong had become obsessed with winning the Bloody Lime after Hadley made the mistake of showing it to them during a wicked game of ring taw. The A boys were vicious when it came to all games, and marbles was no exception. By now, Hadley had seen them in action and knew to be afraid. Vassie’s brood were known to take skin off the way they played tops, their goal being more to wound rather than out-spin an opponent. Similarly, football was just a good excuse to get the other players in a headlock. The twins, Anthone and Amber, seemed especially keen on murdering one another. Their method of choice was hockey. Apparently no one had ever told Anthone and Amber that you needed a puck to play. They preferred slapping around roller skates, food, or their father’s old tools, and it was just tough luck if you were the goalie. When the A boys made up their mind to go after the Bloody Lime, Hadley knew his goose was cooked. The only thing remotely in question was which A would win the marble.
“It’ll be me, I bet,” said Armstrong, the youngest of the boys. “I want it so bad, I can practically taste it.”
“It won’t be you,” sniggered Andrew, who was the oldest of the A’s. “You can catch a ball like Spud Davis, but when it comes to fulking marbles, you ain’t worth cow shit.”
“What’s that marble taste like when you think about it, Armie?” Atticus asked.
“Limes,” Armstrong said. “And blood of course.”
The contest to win the Bloody Lime was set for a Sunday afternoon in the dirt lot behind Vassie’s house. Time was when Hadley could knuckle down with the best of the best, but Vassie’s sons paid him little respect with regard to experience. In fact, age was of no advantage at all in any game involving the A boys. For one, Andrew and Atticus were taller than Hadley by a head. For two, even the younger, shorter ones were brutes to be bargained with. If Hadley were to hold a bag of grass seed in each arm, they’d out-weigh him all the same. Of course, marbles was a game where size didn’t normally count, but this was not the case with these boys. Whereas Hadley and Loomis had rarely played any game that came to shoving or punching, Andrew had gleefully explained to Hadley that shoving and punching were a part of the family rules.
“Shoot, if you can’t knock somebody’s block off, why play?”
After a rigorous hour of marbles in the dirt lot, Hadley felt good just to come away with his life, much less his old marble. But come away, he did. He rubbed his bruises and headed for home, even as the boys hurled insults at him, and a broken bottle or two.
“Prepare to die next week, old fart!” they shouted, which was their way of saying that Hadley would not hold onto the Bloody Lime for long.
By some miracle, Hadley managed to go home with his own marble the following week, too, along with Anthone’s root beer cat’s eye and a minor nosebleed, courtesy of Andrew’s elbow. Afterward, Hadley tossed the cat’s eye in the air and held it up to the sun, feeling no less pleased with himself than he did after winning a marble as a boy. Maybe he was even more pleased.
“You taking toys away from my kids?” Vassie asked after he took the cat’s eye out of his pocket for the fifth time to admire its beery sparkle.
All of Hadley’s blushing parts heated up at once. “I guess I am.”
“Well, ain’t that something!” Vassie said. “I hope you steal every last one of them marbles. I’m sick of tripping over the stupid things.”
Hadley was scared of Vassie’s family, but he liked them, too. They were savage Indians until bedtime, and then they trampled over one another to kiss their mother goodnight. They hardly left a room without telling her how much they loved her, never mind that they might be chasing someone with a shovel two minutes later. It was quite a spectacle. Rich and Guido were not nearly so physical when it came to tormenting others. To see the goodness in Vassie’s boys, a person had to look beyond the bruised knuckles and black eyes. Every Saturday they hawked perfume on the corner of 5th and Carson. Perfume! If that wasn’t goodness and love, Hadley didn’t know what was.
Vaseline was worried about the violence she saw in her sons. “I’ve tried everything under the sun to get the meanness worked out of them. Hell, we played dolls once for a whole week, and everyone had to hold their babies all day long, and if anyone kilt one or hit somebody over the head with one, I promised we’d play dolls for a month. Would you believe it, all the babies lived. I thought we’d turn some sort of corner, but the minute I let the little monsters put the dolls up, out came the boxing gloves again.” She shook her head in disgust. “I chalked it up to one more lesson that didn’t stick, but I’ll tell you this: last Christmas my sister-in-law’s boy, Alvin, come across one of the dolls in the closet and decided to take it down to the tracks and tie it to the rails and wait for a train to run it over. It was Amber’s baby, as I recall. Poopyhead, he’d named her. Well, when Armie saw what Alvin was up to, he charged into the house screaming his head off, and I was sure someone was dead. When the boys got wind of Poopyhead’s plight, they mounted a rescue party such as you have never seen. The baby was saved, but to this day, Alvin’s got an ear that won’t stand up normal. Looks like somebody taped a banana peel to the side of his head.”
Hadley winced. Mama would say that an ear damaged due to foolishness was a righteous punishment, seeing how ears said so much about a man. “Well, they’re protective, at least,” Hadley said of her boys.
“I’m not sure that’s good enough.”
###
It was that same night that Vassie noticed the scars on Hadley’s back for the first time.
“Turn over,” she said after she touched one.
Hadley rolled on his stomach and Vassie ran her fingers up and down each one as though she were counting something much harder to figure than the number of marks on his skin. He buried his face in the pillowcase, wondering if he’d be able to lie when she asked him where the scars came from. But she didn’t ask. She curled up next to him instead and took his finger and pressed it to the curve behind her knee.
“I got this one the day Peach lost his job at the Do Rite Hardware Store. He swiped me with a daisy grubber while I was drying the dishes.”
Hadley fingered the bumpy dent in her skin. He’d never noticed it before.
“Feel this,” she said, and she put his hand on her ribcage.
“I thought you said you got that from Andrew’s racing top”
“I did. Peach threw it at me. He was a mean man, Hadley. More than that, he was a frustrated man, and frustration leaves some pretty bad scars, by my experience. I don’t like the things it does to a man.”
###
Nina had taken to sulking like she was terminal. There were more notes than ever being pushed under Hadley’s front door. The bulk of them were made up of only one or two lines, as though the depth of her anger prevented her from steadying a pencil long enough to write more. Some were so sweet, they shredded his heart into a million pieces. I miss talking to you, Hadley. Others were nothing but sour. You have ruined my life! Without wanting or meaning to do it, Hadley found himself avoiding her for the first time in his life.
One afternoon, Vassie’s boys insisted on walking Hadley home, and when they spotted Nina in the front yard, all five were simultaneously struck dumb by her glum expression.
Nina was smoking on the front steps, and every time she inhaled, it looked like she was being forced to drink urine, her face was just that pinched.
“She sure do look like a pill,” Atticus said. “I bet she’s mean as all get out, ain’t she, Mr. Crump?”
“Yeah,” Anthone
said. “She musta ate something rotten to make her face go like that.”
Andrew rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “I dunno. I wouldn’t kick her out of bed for eating crackers.”
Hadley looked from boy to boy, unable to decide which one he wanted to strangle most.
“Can we meet her?” Andrew asked.
“No!” Hadley said.
At fourteen, Andrew had the eyes of a wolf. In addition to breaking windows and Indian burns, he had a God-given gift for making rude remarks. “What about that one then?” he asked, nodding toward the other side of the yard.
“Who that?!” Atticus asked.
“That the boss lady, ain’t it?” Andrew asked.
“I thought she’d be older,” Atticus said.
“She is older,” Hadley said.
Lucinda was sunning herself in a chair, wearing a bathing suit the color of a blush. She pressed a glass of lemonade against her forehead and waved at Hadley.
“Damn!” Anthone said. “You get to be that lady’s gardener?”
“I’d like to plant my seed in her,” Andrew said.
Hadley ordered the boys to go home.
Usually, Hadley made the trip alone. The problem with making the trip alone was that Mayhew Lane, where Vassie lived, was one block over from Dixon Street, where Flora Gibbs lived. Hadley had not set foot in the colored branch since the night Flora made him take home his spoon. He’d avoided Dixon Street as well. While the walk home from Vassie’s house did not require a trip down Dixon, Hadley had let himself be tempted once to take a more heartbreaking route.
It was the day he heard from Anthone that Mr. Gibbs was dead. A neighbor boy had told Anthone that the old man that lived in the yellow house had slipped off a step stool and hit his head on the kitchen stove. The neighbor and Anthone had spent the afternoon throwing a ball to each other across the street, hoping to get a look at the body when it was carried out of the house.
“I knew Mr. Gibbs,” Hadley told Anthone in an attempt to shame the boy. “He was a good man. There are people who will miss him.” Hadley remembered Flora’s father as happy and green. He wondered how she was handling such a terrible loss.
The Reading Lessons Page 27