by Barb Johnson
For a while, I stay out front setting up a drink station, chatting with Dooley. When I finally go back to the kitchen, I find Maggie sitting on the counter wearing that life-sentence look, the one she’s worn like prison stripes since she told me about the affair. And I can’t stand it. How in every argument Maggie’s a prisoner and I’m the warden. And I can’t stand that no one can tell us how long until we’ll both be free. I turn to the stove where Dooley has left a big pot of chicken andouille gumbo, a favorite from our childhood. I lift the giant lid and sniff at the contents.
“You want help with that?” Maggie asks, hopping down from the counter.
Blood ricochets through my veins, angry and confused in its familiar channels. I take a deep breath. “I could use some help,” I say, careful not to let my voice carry even the tiniest speck of tenderness.
When we get the pot out on the table, Maggie cups my elbow. “I shouldn’t have steamrolled you into having this party.” This is why it’s hard ever to stay mad at Maggie. Unlike me, she’s always right there with an apology when she screws up. “I shouldn’t have pushed,” she says.
“No, you shouldn’t have,” I snip, even though I’m the jackass here.
“Pudge and Big Luce are coming, right?” she asks. “And Dooley and the band. Luis. That’s a party right there.”
And that’s what does it, Maggie bouncing back like that. That’s what always breaks me, makes me soften my heart and try to do right. I always wish I were more like Maggie, that I could actually be quick to let things go, instead of just pretending to be.
I let Maggie pull me to her, and I rest my cheek on her shoulder. “I’m so sorry,” I whisper into her neck. “It just felt too soon. And it’s driving me crazy how I think I should be over it and then I’m not. I want to be. I do. But I’m not.” I lift my head and look at Maggie. “And a part of me,” I confess, “a really immature part of me, thought that fucking this up would make us even. And then I’d be over it. But I’m not.”
Maggie doesn’t say anything. We just cling to one another, swaying at the table near the kitchen, me whispering a mea culpa into the confessional of my beloved’s neck.
“Tomorrow’s another day, Scarlett,” she says at last. “We can start over then. But tonight we eat. Tonight we drink.”
I point to the galvanized tubs overflowing with beer. “Tonight we drink a lot.”
I’m watching the party from the loft, which makes the whole thing feel like a dream. Fragments of conversation float up to me like messages from a collective unconscious. The strings of bright lanterns inside the Bubble look like highways of happy, blinking light that run straight into a hopeful future. At the front, the snack machine glows, steady, sure.
Someone sent an invitation; that much is clear. The big room is filled and still, like magic, people keep coming. I’d like to believe that what I’m witnessing is a spontaneous will of this crowd to gather here to bear witness to the fact that we are still alive in this hard time. There is real trouble in the world, but there is real magic, too.
Downstairs, Pudge is clean if not sober, and twice now I’ve seen him whisper something to Dooley in between songs. Before Pudge gets too unsteady, Dooley will let him sing with the band. Pudge has a clear, lugubrious bass voice, one that’s not necessarily suited to the high notes of “Danny Boy,” which is the only thing he ever sings. He’s actually developed a nice arrangement for it, but he always cries halfway through the old-fashioned song. Someone always brings him a beer then. And everyone calls his name, Pudge! Pudge! Every time, he laughs, makes fun of himself. Crying like a goddam titty baby.
I turn away to check the other side of the room and find Calvin standing at the top of the stairs like some new installment of my loft dream.
We hug, and he pulls me up off the ground. When he sets me down again, he flexes his chest muscles, an old habit.
“I hear you got a new gig repairing windshields,” I tell him.
“From Janet?”
“From Pudge.” I point to Pudge, who’s still hovering near the band, waiting to sing.
“Oh.” Calvin gives a sharp whistle. “Yeah. Wow.”
“He’s actually a good guy, Calvin. If you can help him, I wish you would.” I lean with my back against the railing, study the other side of the room. Friends and neighbors everywhere.
Calvin sits in the desk’s chair, rolls it this way and that. “Laundromat looks good, Delia. You still like it?”
“I do,” I answer, and it’s true. My love for the Bubble has never wavered.
Downstairs, Maggie is dancing with Big Luce. The sight of her pulls at me like an instinct. I am meant to love Maggie Kelly, is what it feels like. Behind Maggie and Big Luce, Luis has made a hammock with the hem of his shirt, and he’s loading cups of lemon ice into it. He’ll sell them out on the street and then come back for more. Which is why Big Luce put them there in the first place. We all try to keep money in Luis’s pockets.
Calvin gets hold of the stapler on my desk, and he opens and closes it, shoots staples like a kid, complete with sound effects. Kshh-kshh-kshh.
“Hey,” I say. “I had a dream about you.”
The stapler snaps shut. “Ohhh?”
“Not like that, Calvin. I dreamed you were delivering Chinese food.”
Calvin is suppressing a grin. He wants this to be dirty.
“You were delivering Chinese food that I hadn’t ordered,” I tell him.
“Sometimes the ladies don’t know what they want,” he says, mugging, “till Calvin brings it to them.” He flexes his muscles again.
“Doofus,” I say.
Calvin is a man of infinite and completely natural confidence. Any second now, he’ll charge downstairs and pick up an instrument and play in the band. Or he’ll explain to some guy the very best way to catch a catfish. Or he’ll juggle what’s left of the lemon ices to great applause. That’s how Calvin is made.
I’m surprised then, when, instead of dashing off, he comes over and leans against the rail next to me. Puts his arm across my shoulder like an old war buddy. Calvin is a practical, uncomplicated man, who mostly thinks practical, uncomplicated thoughts. I have always felt safe when I’m next to him.
We stand like that for a while, just watching the party. Before I’m even aware that the words have formed in my mind, they spill out of my mouth. “I cheated on you with Maggie,” I admit, twenty years after the fact.
“I know,” Calvin says, like I just told him his shoe was untied.
“You knew? Why didn’t you say anything?”
“People love who they love, Delia. You and Maggie, anybody could see that was love.” Calvin squints, as though looking at something small or faraway. “Me and you? That was just small-town kids sticking together until they found their way.”
“Proximity,” I say.
“Pretty much.” Calvin is looking out the front window to the sidewalk, where his wife is doing a trick with a napkin and two spoons. He smiles. “You always were a good friend, though. Even as kids we had that.”
“But what about the cheating? Weren’t you mad?”
“Of course I was mad, but I got over it eventually.” He nods toward Janet outside. “After a while, I had other things to think about.”
There’s a break in the music, and we both look down into the crowd.
“I’m going to get a beer,” Calvin says. “You want one?”
I follow him downstairs, where everyone’s had the chance to get enough alcohol in them to be their shiniest selves. Dooley and the guys launch into some Afro-Cubano, and a man from the neighborhood, a recent arrival from El Salvador, plays a set of timbales he brought. Several people start tapping counterpoint on empty beer bottles. Calvin disappears into the crowd, and I look around for Maggie. She’s over at the beverage table making a nectar soda for Luis, whose dirty face is lit with adoration.
After the jumpy dancing song, Dooley switches to an acoustic guitar, and Pudge limps up to the microphone.
&nbs
p; “He’s always been a good singer,” I hear behind me. Big Luce. She moves up next to me and hugs me to her sideways. “Congratulations,” she whispers, leaning in. Despite myself, I’m happy to hear it. Maggie was right: I did want to take this step.
Luis has gone outside, where he’s shaking down several guests for the price of a lemon ice, but he’s staring back through the window, keeping watch. Up front, Pudge has closed his eyes, and he’s burrowing into the lyrics.
But come ye back when summer’s in the meadow
Or when the valley’s hushed and white with snow
Any second, his voice will break and the words will take him down. We are all, the whole roomful of us, trying to hold Pudge up with our minds. Everyone wants him to make it.
‘Tis I’ll be here in sunshine or in shadow
Oh, Danny boy, my Danny boy…
It’s dark now. Outside, termites—Formosans—hover in clouds near the windows, where they fling themselves against the glass, hungry to get at the blinking lanterns hanging over the crowd. If they could get in, they’d eat the paper shades in a second, but the hot lights would kill them for their greed. Even so, I always imagine that they die happy, having gotten exactly what they wanted.
In the end, Pudge can’t finish the song. He cries and has to stop. The crowd murmurs its consolations of next time, and almost had it. Then Big Luce starts to chant Pudge! Pudge! and everyone joins in. Someone brings him a beer. Pudge hitches his pants and rocks into the crowd. Before he gets to the titty baby thing, the guy who brought the timbales claps him on the shoulder. “Eso si que es,” he says. It is what it is.
Just before sunrise, I’m cleaning up the empties and wrapping the leftovers while Maggie makes omelets in the Bubble’s old kitchen. I’m a little jittery, worried that the other shoe is about to drop. I can’t imagine that Maggie is just going to let my invitation failure go, that she’s not even pissed about it. But she’s at the stove humming the theme song to The Jetsons, and that’s not a song a girl can hum when she’s mad.
The smell of the omelets draws the timbales guy out of the big industrial dryer, where he’s been passed out. I wrap a tortilla around an omelet and send him on his way. Before I close the door, I check the BMW. Empty.
Back inside, I lock up. Maggie and I are alone at last. “Doesn’t look like Luis slept in the car,” I say.
Maggie is cracking eggs into a glass bowl. She does it with one hand, her fingers cradling the shells. “He slept in the shed,” she says.
“Luis is in the shed?” I peek out the back door.
“He was,” Maggie calls over her shoulder. “He went home a little while ago.”
“But how…”
“After Dooley and the band left, Pudge walked out to the BMW and asked Luis if he wouldn’t rather crash in the back.”
“And Luis just went?”
“Yup.”
I’ve spent so much time thinking about how to keep him from rejecting the offer, it’s never occurred to me to just ask Luis if he’d like to stay in the back instead of sleeping in the car.
“You want mushrooms in your omelet?” Maggie asks.
“I reckon.”
“I love it when you say ‘I reckon.’”
“I know you do,” I say, and I kiss the back of her neck. I’m thankful to know what she likes, what makes her happy. To know what she wants from me and how to give it to her. I want to ask about the invitations, if she found out who sent them, but I might be getting a do-over here. I might be getting the chance to give Maggie a do-over, too.
I put the glass mixing bowl in the sink and fill it with water. A drop gathers at the mouth of the leaky faucet. It strains against the opening, and I just stand there waiting. When it finally falls, it breaks open in a fit of shine.
After the omelets, I go up to the loft to get my keys and to double-check for other passed-out party guests. Downstairs, Maggie settles into the window seat to read the cards that people brought us. Strings of lanterns blink vaguely over her head. Even the light from the snack machine is giving way to the pink dawn that’s gathering around her as though she is its source.
Up in the loft, my heart pounds with a fierce anniversary love. How is it that we have made it this far? I am drawn to Maggie’s light, is how I explain it to myself, and she, mysteriously, is drawn to mine. We might die flinging ourselves at each other. But it might be that we will both burn hotly and happily and thoroughly until there’s nothing left of us.
“Maggie,” I call down to her. She looks up from the cards, smiles at me, a bright, irresistible smile. “Come see,” I say.
St. Luis of Palmyra
Luis eases down the hall to where his mama’s door is still closed. She’s been crashed in her room since he got home from school. The Krewe of Idiots—that’s what Luis calls Junior and his friends—are laid out all around the living room. Junior Palacios is his mama’s boyfriend, and he doesn’t go anywhere without the Idiots, a group of grown men whose only job in life is to follow Junior around and do whatever he says.
In the hallway, Luis stretches up on tiptoe, watches the living room through a fist-sized hole in the hall door. The Idiots are running their mouths about what all they’re fixing to do. Big talk about whose car might be just about to disappear and who shouldn’t sit on his porch unless he’s looking to take the big nap. What they actually do is, the skinny ones fire up some meth and the fat ones smoke a joint. And then everybody’s like, Put it on America’s Most Wanted! And: Gimme the remote, boy! And: Boy? Boy? Go home and tell your mama you got beat up by a boy! All the yelling cracks Luis up. It seems like everyone would know by now that the remote has to sit on top of Junior’s big fat stomach. If you want to watch TV, you’re gonna watch what Junior wants to watch. Why argue? But the Idiots always do. That’s what makes them Idiots.
“Deysi, you can get your own ass up,” Junior yells to Luis’s mama, “or I can come in there and get it up for you. You been home all day and we got jack to eat!”
Luis could point out that Junior ain’t been about much today, either, but when he gets in the middle of that kind of stuff, it just makes it worse for his mama, so he usually keeps his mouth shut, goes outside until whatever’s coming has been and gone. Sometimes, Junior passes out without having to hit anybody.
Luis opens the hall door, keeps his eyes on his own feet. He scoots along the back edge of the living room, into the kitchen, then out the side door. Junior and the Idiots are like dogs or like those giant flying cockroaches: if you make eye contact with them, they feel like they’ve got to come after you. Luis doesn’t have time for all that mess.
Tomorrow is the sixth-grade science fair, and Luis is pretty sure he’s gonna win it because science is his best subject. Science doesn’t care how big you are; anyone can make it work, which is good for Luis, who’s the smallest kid in his grade. He’s gonna do a project that shows what makes a radio run. All he needs is a few parts, and he knows just the place to get them.
Luis karate-kicks his way down the alley next to the house. Hi-yah! He’s ready to knock the nuts off of anybody hiding there in the dark. When he gets to the back pier of the house, he reaches under and runs his fingers along the sill until he snags his screwdriver, the good one he found outside Spanky’s Automotive. It’s got LIFETIME GUARANTEE stamped right into the handle.
Somebody dumped a red BMW a little farther down Palmyra Street, across from the Laundromat. Luis has been hanging out in it at night. Making plans. He might take that car straight to California. Take his mama with him and maybe a dog, like a pit bull, the kind with those spooky blue eyes. Then if somebody looked at him wrong, Luis wouldn’t say a thing. Wouldn’t have to say, Mess with me, and my dog gonna fuck you up. He’d let that bad boy’s teeth do all the talking.
Just before he gets to his car, Luis sees Miss Delia, who owns the Bubble, which is what everyone calls the Laundromat. She’s leaning against the wall by the old pay phone. He watches her take a hit off her cigarette, tip her head back,
and one-two-three-four smoke rings come floating out of her mouth.
It seems like to Luis that if you own a place, you should be able to do whatever you want. When Miss Delia wants to smoke at the Bubble, though, she has to do it on the side of the building that doesn’t have any windows because she’s supposed to be quitting. Miss Maggie, the other Laundromat lady, gets ten dollars every time she catches Miss Delia with a cigarette. Luis wishes Miss Delia would make that same deal with him. He holds up ten fingers to show her she’s been caught. Miss Delia puts the cigarette behind her back and rocks her finger at Luis to say, Nuh-uh. Don’t tell.
“You got homework at the library again?” Miss Delia calls across to Luis.
That’s a joke they have. Luis’s teacher is too lazy to give homework or check it, either one. Whenever Miss Delia asks him what he’s up to in the car, though, Luis likes to tell her he’s doing homework.
“I’m working on my science project,” Luis says, and it sounds just right. Like he could do a project and win the science fair tomorrow, no problem. He points to the BMW. “I’m gonna…” Before he gets to the end of the sentence Luis realizes that he can’t tell her about the radio project. If she knows he’s gonna take the radio from the BMW, she might want to tell him it’s wrong. Then she’ll watch him to make sure he doesn’t take it. And she for sure won’t aim her scar at it for him. Taking the radio isn’t wrong. It’s just the way it is. “I got a secret, supersonic, stealth-bomber project,” he says, “and those punks are gonna be sorry they ever thought about trying to be in the science fair with me.”