That’s when Nikki raised her arms and protested. She said, These are good people, Ricky (meaning Annick and me), and they need to hear the truth. So she told us what really happened, a story that involved her mother’s black chauffeur, Lincoln, who would occasionally run Diahann up to 125th Street in Harlem to get her hair styled at Rose Meta’s salon. Rose Meta was Joe Louis’s wife and the best stylist in the city. And Diahann would never have said anything like what Ricky had accused her of saying. Not in a million years. Ricky said, Are you sure? Never! Ricky pointed to the hassock (in the role of a living room chair) to his right—I can see her sitting right there and asking me point-blank. Never happened, Nikki said.
I kind of liked Ricky’s story better, though I did appreciate the supporting cast that Nikki wove into hers, especially that chauffeur. But should we trust Nikki’s memory just because she more assertively told the story? Here’s the thing. When I got home last night, I went online and Googled “Rose Meta”—no such gal. Not exactly. Joe Louis did marry one Rose Meta Morgan (annulled two years later) and Rose Morgan did co-own a beauty shop in Harlem called the Rose Meta House of Beauty. I know that if Ricky thinks harder about it, he’ll remember the blouse Diahann was wearing when she had her moment of doubt. And he’ll remember Diahann’s daughter’s name—Suzanne! Yes, and Suzanne was across the room watching cartoons with her feet up on the coffee table.
AUDREY WAS asleep beside me with her thumb in her mouth. The truck’s engine was off, but my body kept vibrating. The silence and the stillness were what woke me. Dad was gone. To the bathroom, I figured. Deluxe put a paw over his eyes. I had been dreaming I was in a dark and cramped theater watching a young woman dance on a bare stage. She wore black. She had no arms, no neck, and no stomach. Just air where all that business should be. She tapped and brushed, scuffled and riffed, and kept up what I knew to be delightful patter even though I couldn’t make out a word she was saying. I thought about her parents, how proud and how sad they must feel. The door opened and Dad shook my leg and said, “Wake up, lazy bones.”
Audrey stretched and moaned.
I said, “Where are we?”
“We’re there.”
“Where?”
“Monroe, Louisiana.”
“Why?”
“We’re spending Christmas here.”
“What’s that smell?”
“The paper mill.”
I sat up on my elbow and looked out the window at the silhouette of a house. The drapes were opened in a large picture window in the living room, and margarine-colored light spilled to the lawn. The window looked like a drive-in movie screen hung up out there in the dark. I crawled into the passenger seat. Now the window looked like an illuminated painting in a dark gallery. And the subject of the painting was this wash of stark light. In a corner of the living room stood a flashy aluminum Christmas tree with lavender ornaments. There was a starburst clock on the wall above a blond console television. A turquoise couch. Over the couch and facing the window was a huge mirror in which I could see our truck and my own groggy face. I waved to myself to be sure. The Christmas tree seemed to be revolving. There did not seem to be a shadow in the room.
Dad said, “Let’s go in and say hello.”
Dad opened the back door, and we stepped into the house like we owned it. The kitchen smelled like tuna fish. He shut the door and dropped his keys into a soup bowl on the counter. He put his hands on our shoulders and called out, “We’re here!” A woman and a little boy about four walked in. She couldn’t have weighed ninety pounds. She had light brown hair cut unfashionably short, shorter than Dad’s, and bright blue eyes. She was all smiles. She clapped her hands and said, “You two are so precious.”
Dad said, “Kids, this here is Stevie.”
The little boy scrambled across the floor on all fours. Stevie said, “He don’t bite.”
Dad said, “Drake likes to play doggie.” Drake rolled over on his back.
Stevie said, “He wants you to pet him.”
Dad picked Drake up and held him on his hip. Drake panted and licked Dad’s face. Stevie said, “Let me take a picture of this.” We all stood rather stiffly, and Stevie raised her hands to her face like she was holding a camera. She said “Smile,” shut one eye, and pumped her finger. She said, “Click!”
Audrey remembered that Deluxe was still in the truck. Dad put Drake on the floor and said he’d fetch Deluxe. Audrey asked Stevie if Drake minded cats. Not at all. Drake sniffed my shoes. I patted his head, asked him how he was. Stevie said, “You two must be starving. I’ve got you some sweet tea and spaghetti-tuna casserole. Sit. Come on.” I asked her whose baby photo was on the fridge.
“That’s Elvis’s baby girl, Lisa Marie.”
“You know Elvis?”
“I met him once when I was in high school. He was with the Hayride over to Shreveport, and he stopped in on his way back to Memphis for pie and coffee at the Dinner Bell where I was waitressing. He wasn’t much of anything then except a very handsome and polite boy. Of course, I’d heard him on KWKH. He signed a napkin for me.”
Deluxe leaped from Dad’s arms to the counter and from the counter to the top of the fridge. He swatted a glue stick to the floor and yeowled. Stevie said, “I’ve been looking for that. Thank you, kitty.” Audrey asked Stevie if Drake liked dog biscuits.
I said, “Drake doesn’t say much.”
Stevie said, “He doesn’t talk at all.”
Audrey said, “Does he know any tricks?”
I said, “Do you know why?”
Dad grabbed a Jax beer from the fridge, wrapped a paper-towel jacket around the bottle, and joined us at the table.
Stevie said, “Had the doctors take a look. They don’t know. His hearing’s just fine. Might be something serious, they say. Might could be he has nothing to say. He’s just not ready yet. Time will tell.”
Audrey said, “Be nice if he could tell us what he likes so much about being a dog.”
Dad coaxed Deluxe down with a saucer of tuna from the casserole.
Stevie said, “He understands us well enough, don’t you, sweetie?” She smoothed Drake’s hair. He smiled.
Dad said, “So what do you think?”
Audrey said, “I’m sure glad we’re not in that truck anymore.”
I said, “I don’t know what to think.”
Dad said, “You’re wondering what the setup is.”
“I think I know what the setup is.”
Audrey said, “What are you talking about?”
Dad said, “We’ll talk in the morning. I think we could all use some sleep. Look at the time.”
That was fine by me. I was hoping this would all go away, that what I was thinking was so obvious was in reality a misperception easily explained away.
Stevie showed us to our rooms. Drake and I had a room with bunk beds, and Audrey had a room to herself. She cried and said she missed her mom. She said she didn’t want to sleep alone. She was scared. She looked at me, cried some more. Dad said, “Okay, you can sleep with Johnny.” She said she wanted to sleep with Stevie, and she hugged Stevie and put her head on Stevie’s stomach.
Stevie said, “Of course you can, honey.” She kissed shrewd little Audrey’s head. So Dad and I ended up on the bunks. Audrey and Stevie slept in her double bed with Drake and Deluxe curled at their feet.
I stared at the ceiling and said, “I don’t want another mom. I want Mom.”
Dad said, “That might not be possible.”
“But it might.”
He said, “We’ll talk tomorrow, all of us. A family meeting.” And then he was snoring away.
I said, “Goodnight, Roscoe.” What does he think he’s doing? I figured I’d never sleep, but I was so tired I thought I heard a voice tell me that at night the sunflower dreams of the sun. And then I was deep in dreamland, and Blackie and I and a crew of eager orphan boys, whom I couldn’t see but knew were with us, were on our way to Central City to film the final episode of The Drone (The Death
of the Drone?), and to pass the time because it seemed like we’d never get there—“They keep moving the city farther away,” Blackie told me—I told him about the dream I’d had while we were driving through Louisiana, how I was abducted by my own father and taken to live with my “real family,” and I had a brother who thought he was a puppy but was actually a spider monkey, and he would wrap his tail around my shoulder while we sat on the couch and watched TV and ate peanuts. He liked me to scratch him under the chin. Blackie said that would make a great movie, and I said I was just happy that I woke up, and he said, “Go wake up your brother,” and I said, “Haven’t you heard a word I said?” I shook my head and looked out the window, but it was night, and all I could see was my reflection, and I waved at it, and I became aware that I could no longer hear the hum of the diesel, and that’s what jolted me half awake, and I realized I couldn’t hear any traffic at all on O’Connell Street and how odd that was, and I opened my eyes and saw the ceiling a foot in front of my face and understood that I wasn’t in Requiem anymore, and then I felt a tug at my leg and heard, Arf! Arf!
Five Years Next Week
I FOUND DAD out on the carport, sitting at a picnic table, drinking coffee, smoking a cigarette, and shaking his head at whatever he was reading in the newspaper. He said, “You’re up!” It was cold enough to see your breath and for Dad to be wearing a bulky cardigan sweater, but it felt like spring to me after the deep-freeze of Requiem. The backyard grass was green, and a mockingbird sang in what I would soon learn was a pecan tree. I sat in one of the aluminum lawn chairs and tucked my bare feet under me. A half dozen clear plastic bags of water hung from the roof of the carport. “What’s that about?”
“Keeps the flies away. Flies got these, what do you call it, these multifaceted eyes, so when they look at the water they see like a thousand other flies looking back at them. Scares the shit out of them or something. Anyway, they go crazy and scoot, and we never have any problem with flies when we’re eating out here.”
I wondered how come we didn’t know about that in Massachusetts, and what else didn’t we know about? Besides the picnic table and chairs, there were a barbecue grill made from an oil barrel cut in half, a bag of charcoal briquettes leaning against the house, a green plastic sandbox in the shape of a turtle. The shell was the cover, but the cover was off, upside down, and filled with a few inches of water and leafy debris. Next to the sandbox was a banged-up red and white tricycle with rusted wheel spokes and ragged red, white, and blue streamers on the handlebars.
I said, “Does Mom know about this?”
“I don’t think she should. Do you?”
“What you’re doing isn’t right.”
“Stevie and I aren’t married.”
“So what’s your plan?”
“I’ll play it by ear.”
“It’s not a piano.”
Dad put the cigarette out and folded his hands under his chin. “Johnny, believe me, I didn’t plan for something like this to happen.”
“What about Mom?”
“You don’t know what it’s like to be lonely.”
“How can you say that?”
“Sorry.”
“What does Stevie know?”
“Everything.”
“Even your real name?”
“Yes.”
“And she’s okay with that?”
“You’d have to ask her.”
I FOUND Stevie in the bathroom, sitting on the ledge of the pink bathtub. At first I thought she was polishing her fingernails, but she was painting the tile grout with Wite-Out, and her fingernails were, in fact, clear and filed to the quick. I sat on the toilet and tried to figure out what I should say after “Hello.” I said, “Audrey’s in Drake’s room trying to teach him to speak. To talk, I mean.”
Stevie inhaled from the jar of Wite-Out and then screwed the cap shut. She said, “What’s your favorite smell?”
I said, “Ditto copies. The ones with the blue ink.”
“Mine’s the fresh-ground coffee in the machine at the A&P,” she said. “I didn’t steal your daddy away from your momma. I want you to know that. He came to me. And I sent him away. And he came back. More than once. And I said no. And he said yes. Yes, yes, yes.”
“So how long have you two—”
“Five years next week.”
I stared at the jam jar on the shelf above the sink, at the three toothbrushes in the jar.
“My husband had died, and I was vunerable.” Vulnerable.
“How did he die?”
“Cal drowned in a rice paddy over to Vietnam. Would have survived the gunshot wound in his side, they said, if he could have turned his head.”
“Yikes.”
“Most people didn’t even know we were at war in 1963. Not like today when it’s on the news every night.”
I tried to guess whose toothbrush was red, whose blue, whose yellow.
“I love Rainy. But I have no claim on him.”
I figured Dad’s was red ’cause he had red at home. Drake’s would be blue.
“I’ve got no skills,” Stevie said. “No training, no checking account, no money to speak of. I live in this rent house behind the Piggly Wiggly. When it rains the yard floods, the roof in the living room leaks. All I’ve got are the days given me, and I’m happy for each one.”
I shrugged my shoulders and clenched my jaw. “I don’t know what to do.”
Stevie knelt by the toilet and hugged me, and I let her. I may even have cried though that was not something I did (or do) very often. Whenever I felt the crush of sadness choking my breath, I would simply and involuntarily shut down, go numb. And I would think how I should be sad, any normal person would be sad, but I’m not, so why aren’t I, and why can’t I stop with this distracting blather and let myself feel something other than this fragile, icy calm? But there was nothing I could do about it. I had learned—somewhere—that crying solved nothing. Perhaps the meliorating tears would relieve my ache, but my feelings, I knew, were not the point.
Stevie patted my back, told me everything would be okay. “Let it go,” she said.
I said, “You know he lies.”
She smiled. “Like a mirror.”
“Maybe he has another family in Nebraska.”
“Rainy doesn’t mean any harm with his stories.”
“He never told us about you and Drake. That was a lie, not a story. The story was he’s driving a truck out West. He’s stuck in a blizzard. He needs a valve job.”
Stevie said, “We’ve got us a muddle and a half here, and we need to sort it all out after a while, and we will. Your daddy’s got some deep thinking to do. We all have. But just now your momma’s in a bad way. She needs to be alone with the doctors, so she can recover herself. There’s not a thing that you or I can do about that. Am I right?”
She was right.
“You and Audrey are on your Christmas vacation, so let’s all try to have some fun and be sweet to one another.”
Which sounded fine to me. We shook on it. And then we heard Audrey shout, “He did it!” We hurried to Drake’s bedroom. Drake said it again, his first three words. “I’m a dog!” And then he smiled and said his fourth. “Momma,” or more accurately “Mo-mo-ma,” but close enough. Stevie gave Drake a big hug and told Audrey she was a genius.
Audrey said, “Drake did it.”
“You’re brilliant.”
“Tomorrow we’ll work on ‘love.’”
We went to the kitchen and ate what Stevie called biblical measures of peach cobbler for breakfast and toasted Drake with our bottles of Big Red soda.
Stevie said, “He’s a big boy now!”
Drake even ate some of the cobbler with his fingers before he shoved his face into the bowl.
Audrey said, “Where’s Dad?”
“Might could be he’s out Christmas shopping,” Stevie said. “I’ll bet that’s it.”
Audrey said, “You have Santa Claus down here?”
“Do we ever!” Ste
vie dropped some peanuts into her Big Red, and Audrey made a face. Stevie slid the bottle to Audrey. “Go on, taste of it. You’ll see.”
TURNS OUT that Monroe’s Santa Claus wore a camouflage suit, combat boots, and a green beret, and he parachuted into the parking lot of Howard Brothers Department Store on Louisville. You could see that he was aiming for the bed of a Ford pickup, but a gust of wind carried him into the Nativity scene, where he knocked over and decapitated a Wise Man. The crowd cheered wildly when he told us that he was supporting our boys in Vietnam and that the little Communist children don’t have a Christmas or a Christ. “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh,” he yelled, “Ho Chi Minh will never win!”
Audrey spoke for herself and Drake when they finally got their minute on Santa’s lap. She wanted a brown suede fringed jacket like the Range Rider’s or a pink diary with a lock and key. And a ballpoint pen. Drake, she told Santa, wanted those Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots. And bring something for Johnny Boy, she said. Something bookish. She stood and remembered. “You know we’re not in Requiem, right? We’re in Monroe. On Concordia.” Santa said he knew. They all smiled for the camera.
Dad came out of the store with a color wheel for the Christmas tree. So now the revolving silver tree changed colors from red to yellow to blue to green unless you flipped a switch and kept the wheel from turning and then you could have your choice of a tree in one of four colors. I preferred blue. It just seemed calm to me. Like Delaware is calm. And France. Like the clear sky.
Dad gave Audrey and me $15 each to do our Christmas shopping, and it took us several trips to Howard Brothers and to Spat’s Pharmacy to spend it all. I bought Dad some Soap on a Rope, Audrey a pair of fancy cowgirl gloves with fringed cuffs, Drake a Matchbox truck and trailer, not unlike Dad’s. I bought Mom a mauve monogrammed handkerchief set and Stevie white pelican salt-and-pepper shakers.
On Saturday, Stevie took me fishing at Bayou DeSiard while Dad took the kids to see Chitty Chitty Bang Bang at the Paramount. We fished with twelve-foot cane poles and used Spam for bait. Stevie sprayed her Spam balls with WD-40, and this recipe seemed to work. I caught several bream, which we tossed back. Stevie caught a thirteen-inch gaspergou, usually a spring fish, and a thirty-inch buffalo, the largest fish I’d ever seen. Stevie cleaned the fish right there on shore and put the fillets in the freezer at home. On Sunday, we all skipped church. I was the only one even vaguely interested in going, and though Stevie was sure there must be a Catholic church in town, she wasn’t sure where it could be. Dad took Audrey and Drake bowling. Stevie and I went fishing in the slough by the Ouachita River. We caught a bucketful of blue cats using this awful-smelling blood bait. Stevie pan-fried the fish for supper with hush puppies, coleslaw, and fried okra. Here’s something else we didn’t know about in Requiem, food this delicious. Dad sprinkled pepper sauce on his okra. He told Stevie how he used to take me fishing all the time. I reminded him that while he may have had good intentions, we actually only made it past the Cat Dragged Inn and to the lake once. And that one time he fell asleep in the boat. “And it was so hot that all of our shiners died in the bucket. We didn’t catch a thing. Not so much as a nibble. We drifted into a bed of water lilies.”
Requiem, Mass. Page 18