Roy steps out onto the porch and lets the screen door slap, same as always. It’s his rebellion, Cerise thinks, what he does to get back at her for coming on fifty years of her complaining about him doing exactly that. That’s the way it goes. It makes her smile inside her head, though no way she could let him know she’s onto him.
“Cherry Baby. Marie on the phone, says she needs to get Lil Thomas to the pediatrician tomorrow. Not eating.”
Cerise shakes her head. Their only child, Marie, is a panicky new mother. Came to it too late. She spent too much time educating herself and then being finicky about finding a husband, needed him to be smart and handsome. Always sounded like a dangerous combination to Cerise. Since having their son, Thomas, in February, Marie can’t stop taking the boy to the doctor. Cerise tells Marie that the boy just needs to get hungrier and he’ll take her nipple just fine. The child’s developed a taste for the bottle. Marie puts a noisy pump to her swollen breasts while Cerise watches the plastic container fill with bluey milk. Immunities, Marie says.
“That boy’s fat,” Cerise says to Roy. “She needs to stop worryin’ and let him be.” Cerise sips on her nutritional shake.
Roy shakes his head. He nearly toppled over when he found out their forty-two-year-old daughter had got pregnant. No small miracle that Cerise herself had become pregnant with Marie at thirty-four. Cerise knows he believed that their daughter’s wedding was the last big ticket they’d ever have to pay out, but now, with Marie and her husband, Big Thomas, both taking turns staying at home with Lil Thomas, they hint at wanting money help, and Roy and Cerise just give it. Not like they need much of their retirement, though they’d always had hopes of a camp or a time-share down in Grand Isle, maybe, or a regular vacation someplace. The big Key or Clearwater, maybe.
“Talk her down, Cherry. You know otherwise they’ll be asking for donations again.” Roy looks at Cerise. His same old warm eyes. Who’d have thought you could love somebody’s eyes your whole life?
Cerise rises from her director’s chair. She’s happy the skinny legs she’s got still work well enough. Not as much to look at now, but they’re sturdy. In the kitchen, she picks up the phone from the counter. “Marie, now, when’s the last time Lil Thomas didn’t eat? You’ve got to calm down about that boy or you’re going to kill him with worry.”
“Mom, I don’t have the energy for one of your extended metaphors. He hasn’t eaten, well, almost anything, for over six hours.”
The girl is going to kill the poor boy. Choke him with her worry. Drown him with her worry. “And how many hours you’ve got till his appointment tomorrow?” Cerise asks.
There’s a pause. “Twenty-three,” Marie says.
“Tell me he has a fever.”
“Do you think if Thomas had a fever I’d even be at home? Mom?” Marie has that special tone of indignation in her voice, the one reserved just for Cerise.
“Don’t be burdening that doctor, Marie. She won’t like Lil Thomas and not even know why. Just from seeing him too much, she won’t like your boy. You don’t want a doctor ignoring your child.” It’s worth a try, anyway.
“Why must you always exaggerate, Mother? You take things ten degrees past where they make any sense and I—”
“What’d you call me for, Marie?”
Another pause. “Why won’t he eat, Mom?”
Cerise sighs.
Philomenia Beauregard de Bruges resquares the proper stacks of towels in the linen closet. She walks down the stairs to her husband Joe’s room. She looks inside. He lies there. She can smell it growing in him. It smells like mold. She will bleach the room when it is over. She will return the room to the parlor it is supposed to be. She walks to the kitchen.
Philomenia has told the new neighbors that her name is Prancie. She thinks it sounds like ponies. A name light and dancy. A name to cover her fifty-seven years like a long silk scarf. Prancie sounds like there is wind around.
She should have had a nickname coming up. All caring parents should give children nicknames. She tsks.
The new neighbors burn incense. The smoke travels down the narrow and through her kitchen window in the evenings when she lets the air in. The smell taints the taste of dinner. This bothers Philomenia. The incense and the neighbors’ appearance both bother her. But they took her praline cheesecake with many thank-yous. She had difficulty not staring at the woman’s third eye.
Philomenia will start a journal for them.
Joe calls out from his room. “Philomenia,” he croaks.
Philomenia turns on the faucet. The rice needs rinsing and picking. Prancie cannot tolerate pebbles, Philomenia thinks and smiles. Oh no, Prancie cannot stand pebbles.
Cerise watches surfboarders on cable TV. She’s amazed most when they finish, how they dive into the curling waves and give themselves up to that power. There’s skill there.
She’s seen two dark-skinned boy surfers so far. And one dark-skinned girl looks strong enough to lift a car off a grandmother’s back. Makes Cerise chuckle. But the rest of them are white. Maybe the native Hawaiians have puffed up too big these days and don’t surf but for fun. On another show she saw how they eat too much and are all getting fat. Spam and gravy and piles of food for very little money. Mountains of noodles and fried fish and pork chops. Sandwiches the size of your backside. No wonder why they don’t win surf awards anymore.
Marie’s on her way over with the boy any minute. Cerise would like to keep watching the surfers instead of comforting her daughter, work in her sudoku puzzle book, take a walk around the block. She’s too old to have to look after Marie. Lil Thomas is one thing, but Marie won’t leave him alone with Cerise, not for more than five minutes. Cerise swears that boy’ll get smothered.
A knock sounds.
“Since when do you latch the screen door?” Marie asks when Cerise answers.
“You think it would prevent anything but a cat from getting in?” Cerise asks her daughter. Cerise glances at Lil Thomas. He’s wide awake, his brown curls pretty and tight. He could be a little girl for how long his eyelashes are.
“Well, I couldn’t get in,” Marie says, already with The Tone, and here Cerise hasn’t said a thing to her bad, anything that should warrant it.
They stand on the porch, and Cerise diverts out of instinct, “Lil Thomas looks fine.”
“This neighborhood isn’t getting any better, Mother. You really shouldn’t leave your door open.”
Hadn’t Marie just complained she couldn’t get in? “Well, hello there, Lil Thomas,” Cerise says to her grandson.
The boy chortles, and Cerise’s belly warms all the way through. She could jog around the block the way the boy makes her feel. Maybe she’ll get one of those speed buggies she sees, the ones that look like off-roading bicycles with nubby tires, the buggies that could do crosscountry tours. Cerise could take Lil Thomas through the Smokies, through the Grand Canyon! Up and down the Hawaiian mountains when the surfers aren’t in contests.
“Hello to you, too,” Marie says. She swings Lil Thomas in his car seat and looks around at the neighborhood.
Cerise smiles at the thought of jogging Lil Thomas through Audubon Park in an off-roader. She’d take it on the grass, under the live oaks older than anything she knows. She’d run over the edges of picnic blankets and dawdle by the youngsters smoking their weed in the gazebo, playing bad guitar. “Why, hello, Marie,” Cerise tells her daughter and leans to kiss her cheeks times two.
“People don’t do that outside of Europe, Mother.”
Marie used to love their French greetings. God knows why the woman got pregnant. She’s old-dog cranky, ready to snap at a petting hand. “Come on in out of the heat then,” Cerise tells Marie.
They sit at the kitchen table, Lil Thomas in his car seat on a chair. Cerise needs to bring up the childcare article she read in one of her women’s magazines this month about the shape of babies’ heads. Their heads can get flat on the back, sometimes even sort of square-shaped when they’re left in the s
ame position, in the same carrier. Cerise doesn’t want any grandson of hers to be a squarehead, but she’ll have to find a way to get at the subject later, after Marie settles some.
Marie stands and opens cupboards in that reflexive way she has, looking for food. Cerise smiles at her daughter’s old habit. “Rice pudding left over in the fridge,” Cerise tells her. Of course Marie already knows there won’t be junk, but she can find real cooked food any day of the week in Cerise’s kitchen.
“I want salt,” Marie says. “I can’t get enough salt these days. Is that normal?”
“It’s normal if it’s what you want. Listen to your body. It’ll talk—” Cerise stops herself. Her advice isn’t working well just now.
“My body says ‘I’m a cow,’ ” Marie says. “ ‘Milk me, feed me, milk me.’ ”
At least Marie still has some sense of humor, which makes Cerise happy. “Salt holds water,” she tells her. “You need water to nurse.”
Marie opens the cupboard with spices, dried peppers, sugar. “I feel laden, Mom. I’m a donkey with saddlebags.”
“It’ll pass. Eat what you want.” Cerise watches her daughter pick up the little sacks of bulk spices tied with their handwritten twisty ties from the health store up the way. Marie presses her nose into the plastic flower blossom that tops one of the bags. “Mmm. Curry powder.”
She’s still Marie. “Mmm is right,” Cerise says back. “Nice with goat, or so they say.” Cerise’s never made a thing with goat in her whole seventy-plus years.
“You’d never!” And then Cerise gets her daughter’s smile. Good as gold, Marie’s is.
Cerise glances to Lil Thomas and sees him stick something into his mouth the color of a purple crayon, shaped like an eraser. “Get that out,” she tells him, grabbing. It’s a tear-away ticket from somewhere. Cerise holds it up to Marie. “What’s this from?”
“What?”
“Lil Thomas.”
“Oh, damn it.” Marie walks over and takes the gooey ticket. “There’s a raffle. For a house out in Metairie.”
Cerise has listened to Marie talk about wanting to move to the suburbs ever since she was a girl, always wanting to live like somebody in another place. But Metairie is the suburb of Anywhere, America, one of hundreds of identical suburbs across the country. Suburbs from sitcoms. Metairie reminds Cerise of one big shopping mall. It’s at least as ugly. “How much one of them cost?”
Marie wipes the ticket on her pinstriped skirt and turns away. “He can put a raffle ticket in his mouth but damn if he nurses,” she says into the cupboard.
“Those raffles for houses cost money,” Cerise says.
“A hundred dollars, Mom. The raffle ticket cost a hundred dollars.” Marie goes back to the refrigerator. Lil Thomas begins to fuss.
Cerise bites her tongue. It took her more than a long shift behind the register to make that kind of money. And a hundred dollars is the clean sum, a lot of times in multiples, that they always give to Marie and Thomas. “I see that playing poker is popular these days.”
“Can you just stop it? Please?”
“Is the raffle house nice?”
Marie removes a jar of pickled okra from the fridge door. Lil Thomas squawks, working up to a cry. Cerise’s daughter puts the jar down on the table and cups her breasts. “He makes me leak,” she says.
“That happens,” Cerise says. “It’s natural.” What are the odds of winning one of those raffle houses?
Marie picks up Lil Thomas and bounces him, makes shushing sounds. He works himself up into a full baby wail.
Marie huffs and plunks her donkey self into a chair. She starts unbuttoning her blouse.
“Sometimes, Marie,” Cerise says, “you have to put up with crying.”
Marie rolls her eyes, actually scoffs. “Mother, that’s inane. Yes, I know I have to put up with crying.” She jostles Lil Thomas, trying to undo her fancy-label top. Lil Thomas’ head wobbles.
Cerise wipes at crumbs that don’t exist on the table. “Some women back at the store lost their whole paychecks to the casinos in a single night. Mississippi might could be a bad place.”
“Might could,” Marie says to Lil Thomas, trying to stuff her nipple into his mouth. He twists his head back and forth. Marie’s breasts look about to burst, and suddenly Cerise wants to cry too. Poor boy. Poor mother. “ ‘Might could’ is a colloquialism, Lil Thomas,” Marie says. “ ‘Might could’ might could ruin your chances of a scholarship when you grow up.”
Lil Thomas shoves Marie’s nipple out of his mouth with his tiny tongue. Who wouldn’t? How did Cerise ever raise such an awful daughter? Cerise yearns for an afternoon with surfers on ESPN2. The zebras and antelopes on the Animal Planet channel would do just fine too. They make babies that trot religiously behind their parents. And then they finally leave. They don’t borrow money. They don’t make fun of their parents.
Cerise looks up from her hand circling on the kitchen table to see tears running down Marie’s cheeks. Lil Thomas wails and wails, a high-pitched bleat punctuated with chokes, hitches. The padding of his car seat is a stylish leopard print. Cerise knows that she is wrong. She is seventy-six years old. Enough. She can help her daughter somehow.
“The house isn’t even built yet,” Marie says. “The raffle house.” She stares at screaming Lil Thomas as if he’s an asteroid, a thing flung out of the sky. “But the drawings of it are beautiful.”
The Hollywood people play poker so well because they’re actors, Cerise thinks. Sometimes they make more money in a hand than Cerise ever made in a year. She can act, for sure, same as all married women, but she’s not sure she can hide everything from a daughter. It’s hard to hide all that you need to.
Prancie, as Philomenia has decided to sign at the bottom of her journal entries, resquares the stacks of towels in the linen closet again. The toad has not left his bed since his last treatment. Their insurance is standard, but it is not perfect. Gaps will exist in their coverage in six months. Joe has five months, then, to die.
Prancie decides that she will make another cake for the neighbors. She will make a cake that allows her into their house. Likely they have done terrible things to the traditional interior. Poke-holes and whatnot. Terrible things. Who has a last name that sounds like fish in an aquarium? Gupta. It is simply not right. Prancie is appalled at the smells that waft from their kitchen. Still, they take her cakes, and she is certain that the coconut cream will warrant an invitation inside. Damage is damage, though. Wrongs already done. Wallpaper smells like its inhabitants for years.
The neighborhood has taken one turn after the next. Prancie thought that the block was again making strides when the Minnesota family moved in, but, alas, the father has turned out to be a drunkard. Prancie has seen the man—Ed—drinking at night on his porch. Imagine. With children inside the home. She has made certain to note his appearances in her journals. He is already cross-referenced. What else does a person drink so slowly, with ice in a tumbler? It took Prancie only two nights of observation to decide she had concluded correctly.
Joe must be checked, she reminds herself. The air in the house will be better without Joe in it. She removes the bag of finely shredded coconut from the pantry.
No money paid out to Marie, Thomas, and Lil Thomas equals a celebration. Marie’s finally left with Lil Thomas and a promise to call later. Cerise tends to side dishes in the kitchen while Roy does his thing outside, having wheeled out the grill in honor of the evening. His ribs don’t zing like they used to, but his chicken has gotten better. He’s got a batch of thighs on for tonight. Roy’s scare with his heart makes Cerise even happier to have nights like this, the sun clinging low and muggy to the skyline, the quiet whoosh of Carrollton traffic up the way. She has it in her to ask Nate and Sharon, the whole Harris family over, even those troubled boys if they’re around, for dinner. The drive to the Winn-Dixie isn’t terrible. They have double coupons on beef all month.
She walks to the porch where she can see Roy standing at his
big oil drum grill at the curb. They always feed anybody comes around, same as usual, but they don’t usually manage the proper invites. The older two of the little Harris grandchildren will be by regardless, and one or two hungries from Tokyo Rose. “Roy,” Cerise calls out, screen door in hand, “we need more meat? Invite some people?”
“Cherry, we not feeding no army.” He smiles. Cerise can see the dark place where the molar used to be. They’re only missing four teeth between them, not too bad. She never did order herself the bridge, though. For just one missing tooth, way in the back, it wasn’t worth it. Roy, his bridge fits fine, he says. Maybe or maybe not they’ll get a new one for this last-gone tooth of his. A seventy-eight-year-old with most of the teeth in his mouth is finer than fine for Cerise. Never, really, did she think she’d love a man so much. All those fights, the times with others messing in their marriage. But now Cerise lays her body down again after her bathroom trip in the mornings, watches Roy breathe, and thinks herself the luckiest woman around. Most of his front teeth are still pearly white, too. Lucky, lucky.
Roy’s smile fades at the same time they both hear it, one of those miniature motorcycles. They look like they’re made for dwarves in the circus, those things. The Harris children have friends who bring them round, and then they all whiz up the one-ways the wrong direction. Their heads barely poke up over the hoods of cars on those little machines. Cerise fights her clucking. She watches Roy cross his arms, his usual response. They try not to let what they can’t control get them down. It’s a good life philosophy, she thinks.
Cerise steps to the curb next to Roy. The miniature motorcycle sounds like a weed whacker on crack. Their neighborhood, a maze of one-ways, is usually safe enough, but you never know. The machine carrying a young man more than twice its size zooms around the corner from Poire Street and up the wrong way of Orchid. Cerise and Roy watch it wobble over the permanently grooved pavement. It’s Michael Harris, Cerise can tell. She recognizes his particular slouch.
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