Roadwalkers

by Shirley Ann Grau

  I hadn’t noticed before how long his arms were, unusual on such a short man. “My mother’s having a showing. That’s what I was thinking about.”

  “Big deal?”

  “Very.”

  “Invite me and I’ll come. I’ll even wear my good suit.”

  I was suddenly tired and angry. “I don’t want to invite you. Anyway you can’t come. You’re the wrong color. This is my mother’s white shop.”

  He began doing push-ups again. “You’re black and you’re going.”

  “I’m help,” I said. “I don’t count.”

  He lost his rhythm, his hand slipped, and he collapsed flat on his face. He found that very funny—he squirmed and doubled with laughter.

  Melissa was spectacular. She shimmered, all pale and blond-gold. Orders hummed briskly into my mother’s computer, discreetly placed as far out of sight as possible, in the corner of the shipping room.

  I must have worked especially hard that evening, because I was too tired to drive home. I rode with my mother and David and slept all the way. I had never gotten that tired before.

  Then the school year was ending. Despite my good grades, I panicked with anxiety. I gave up my lunchtime walks. I no longer played music in my room at night. Hour after hour I crammed my memory with facts and figures and names and dates. The morning of my first exam my hands were shaking so badly I could scarcely write. At my last exam I was shivering and panting for air.

  When it was finally over, when the last word was written on the last page, I went to the library and slept soundly for three hours, bolt upright at a table in the reference room. When I woke, my hands were steady, my breathing normal. I caught the shuttle bus to the parking lot. There, I sat in my car and patted out a rhythm on the steering wheel. Beyond the square of mercury-vapor lamps the soft June night filled the world.

  Thoughts jingled in my head like money in an empty pocket. I have come through. Some general said that, in some war. A windy boy and a bit. Rosemary for remembrance. The days of wine and roses. When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed.

  Disconnected words and phrases roared through my head. I let them thunder past, until they faded into the distance, to a whisper, then to silence. Just the way jazz funerals had sounded as they passed my tower window, once, a long time ago. Now I buried my college year.

  I started my car and drove away from the bright enclosure of the parking lot into the dark city streets. I felt strange and very restless; my fingers kept tapping out a pattern on the wheel; my upper lip was twitching; my eyes hurt. Streetlights seemed to have halos around them, and traffic lights danced on their cables as if a hurricane were blowing, though there was no wind at all.

  I hadn’t eaten, not really, since the beginning of the exam period almost two weeks ago. Now I was hungry, so hungry my stomach hurt. I bought a red-and-yellow-striped carton of fried chicken. Its steamy reek of grease and pepper filled my car. Next I went to a liquor store and bought a bottle of cold champagne (Mumm’s, the clerk recommended) and looked up an address in the phone book.

  Mr. Poole lived in the lower-front apartment of a small building not far from the campus. The names on the mailboxes were all faculty; I recognized them from parking slots: Robert Myers, English department. John and Lila Howland, something to do with languages. Edward and Marcie Webster, economics.

  Inside, sound muffled by the building walls, someone was practicing the violin. The exercises were familiar. My fingers twitched into their remembered positions. I had been a capable musician once, not so long ago, less than a year. I never thought about it now, never missed the feel of those complex vibrations running along my jaw. I hadn’t even owned a violin; I used the one belonging to St. Catherine’s. I left it and its music behind, like a shell I’d outgrown. I held out my hands. The tips of my fingers were callus-free, and my nails were long and manicured.

  The bell at Mr. Poole’s apartment door had a message taped over it: OUT OF ORDER, KNOCK. My hands were full, champagne in the right, food in the left, so I kicked, sharply, loudly. When he opened the door, I pushed past him, champagne bottle held swinging by the neck.

  (Like a dead chicken, I thought suddenly, remembering. My mother and I had once lived near a sidewalk poultry market where men in bloody aprons held out headless but feathered birds to their customers. As I did now, extending a box of small pieces all neatly battered and fried.)

  It was a large pleasant living room, bare floors, white walls covered with paintings. There was a fresh clean air to the place; my greasy chicken smells swirled out like thunderclouds.

  “I’ve just finished my exams,” I said, “and I wanted to celebrate. So I brought supper.”

  Astonishment and real fear showed on his face. “You did?”

  “Us black folks are just plain crazy for fried chicken, and everybody’s crazy for champagne.”

  His face shivered and twisted so that I thought he might cry. I put the chicken box down on the Formica-topped coffee table. “We’ll need glasses.”

  “I don’t have any champagne glasses,” he said.

  “Any glasses,” I said firmly, “are better than passing the bottle back and forth like a couple of good old boys on a Saturday night.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes of course. Will these do?” In a moment he produced two wineglasses of thick green glass with short heavy stems.

  I handed him the champagne. “Can you open this? I don’t know how.”

  He disappeared again. I walked around the living room (which I now saw was a dining room too). The paintings on the walls all looked alike, even the colors seemed to be almost the same. “You paint these?” I shouted to him.

  “No.” There was a loud pop from the champagne. “Vincent Muller did those. He shares this apartment with me.”

  “I thought they looked familiar,” I said. “I saw something of his a few months ago. At an art faculty show.”

  “You have a wonderful memory.” He poured two glasses and put the bottle (with a plate for a coaster) on the book-littered table between us.

  I sat on the couch. He perched on the edge of a canvas-and-wrought-iron chair.

  “To your academic success,” he toasted formally.

  “That’s the ugliest chair I have ever seen,” I said.

  “It’s a butterfly chair.” As if I should understand, which I did not.

  I tasted my champagne, then drank it. “Here’s to the end of my first year of college. I’m sorry I didn’t get to take your class.”

  “Perhaps another time, another subject.”

  The champagne burned my mouth. “Do you have any sugar? This would be better if it was sweeter.”

  He popped up instantly—as if I’d yelled “Fire”—and brought a box of Domino cubes. I dropped one in my drink. The champagne frothed up and over the sides of the glass, like a tiny pot boiling, or a tiny volcano erupting.

  Ridiculous. I leaned back in my chair and laughed. Hastily Mr. Poole wiped the table and dried the floor. I poured myself another glass and took out a piece of chicken. Then I curled up my legs and began to eat. “Have a piece,” I said.

  He did. At first he nibbled, then he took a bite. “This is very good,” he said. “Unusually so.”

  “Us black folks know where to get the best chicken.”

  He looked so horrified, so frozen with a mouth full of half-chewed chicken, that I said, “That’s a joke.”

  “Yes,” he said, “of course.”

  I reached for a second piece. “If you’re not a painter, what do you do, except teach, I mean.”

  “I’m a photographer.”

  “Yeah? Tell me something then. I read about a photographer named Bourke-White, so I went and got out the back files of Life and I looked at her pictures. And I’ll tell you what, they weren’t anything. Stiff and wooden, you know. I might just as well have been looking at those Brady pictures of the Civil War.”

  This interested him, I could see. He poured me another glass of champagne and took another piece
of chicken for himself. “They do seem old-fashioned now, yes. Styles change, of course, and you have to remember the sort of camera she used.”

  I settled back, half listening while he talked on with a teacher’s enthusiasm. There was a warm glow at the back of my throat. I licked my greasy fingers carefully.

  He was still talking when the door opened and a couple walked into the room. Mr. Poole’s mouth snapped shut and he stood up. “This is my roommate,” he said. “I told you about him, Vincent Muller, and this is Cindy Petrie.”

  I waved a chicken bone. “I’m Nanda Woods.”

  Vincent Muller said, “We came back to get me a coat and tie for that opening at the Downtown Gallery.”

  Cindy Petrie said to me, “I saw the story about you in Newsweek. The shop looked fabulous. Is Donnie doing some photographs for you? He really is very good.”

  So his name was Donnie. Not Donald, but Donnie. I hadn’t known that.

  And another thing. They assumed that this was a business meeting. A business meeting with Donnie. They just couldn’t imagine any other reason why I’d be here.

  Cindy settled down in the butterfly chair, had a taste of champagne. A couple of rooms away we heard Vincent Muller slamming doors and drawers, and then the final sort purring of an electric razor.

  I said: “You must come, all of you, to the shop on LaFreniere Square.” The one for white faces, I almost said. “My mother and I are planning something different, you might enjoy it. One Sunday a month we’ll open the shop. Rather like a gallery opening without the pictures. There’ll be clothes, of course, but that’s not the real purpose. It’s really just an opportunity for people to talk together, people who might not meet otherwise. I’ll send you an invitation.”

  They looked pleased, they preened themselves, and they smiled graciously.

  “Have a piece of chicken.” I took one myself. After two bites I tossed it back into the box. “I’ll be off.”

  “It was nice meeting you,” Cindy said.

  “I’m so glad you came,” Mr. Poole said.

  I smiled my goodbyes, thinking how much he looked like one of those slender pale white-and-yellow bean sprouts they served at health food restaurants.

  I drove back to the liquor store and bought two more bottles of champagne, using my mother’s credit card this time. And made a phone call.

  “Would you like a visitor?” I said. “I want to celebrate the end of my exams. And I don’t want to go home.”

  Mike said, without the least surprise in his voice, “I’ll give you directions.”

  The champagne made me slow-witted. I got lost twice and had to ask directions. I didn’t know this part of town at all, wide streets and big magnolia trees blooming ghostly white in the streetlights. The air smelled of sweet olive and musty drains and the soft spiciness of old wooden houses. Mike was waiting at the curb. Behind him was an ornamental iron fence and a wide low house with columned porch, floor-length glass windows, and a center door with an oval glass insert.

  “Where have you been? You could have driven to Chicago and back by this time.”

  “I got lost.”

  “Even with my directions?”

  “I forgot them for a while. Or maybe I got them backwards. Here”—I handed him the champagne bottles—“I want to celebrate.”

  “So do I,” he said. “I just finished my last semester. I graduated.”

  “Well, goody good for you. So what do you do next?”

  “I told you. Medical school.”

  “You did tell me. Then what?”

  “Practice with my father. I told you that too. I’m beginning to think you don’t listen to me.”

  “You are very very organized.”

  “And you’ve been at the sauce. Come meet my parents before they leave. Friday is their night for cards.”

  “Card night.” How odd, how funny. I began to giggle. “Every week.” Did they enter it in a desk diary? Friday: cards. Monday: movie. Wednesday: well, maybe they went to church on Wednesday. Such neat little packets of time, like envelopes all sealed and ready.

  Mike said, “How many drinks have you had? Come on inside.”

  His father was short and dark with wooly gray hair beginning to bald. His mother was tiny, slim, and graceful the way a bird is graceful; her skin was pale, almost yellow, so that she seemed to glow. They looked comfortable, settled, at home with themselves. Assured, the way people are who’ve never been hungry or really poor.

  His father said, “What a fine idea.”

  His mother put out a bowl of nuts. “I love champagne.”

  “Do you have any champagne glasses?” I said.

  “Yes,” his mother said, “if Mike doesn’t mind climbing for them. They’re in the top cabinet, over the refrigerator.”

  “That’s wonderful,” I said. “I want to have my drink very properly.”

  “I read about your mother and her new shop.” She perched on the edge of her chair. I almost expected to see her flick her tail for balance.

  You are light enough to pass the door, I thought. You could walk right in and no one would notice. Well, almost no one. Aloud I said, “I’ve worked for my mother since I was a child, and I’ve loved every minute.”

  I stopped abruptly. Surprised. That was the truth, the exact truth.

  Mike came back with hollow-stemmed champagne glasses on a small round tray. We toasted each other: Happy times and best of luck.

  When the phone rang and his father rose to answer, his mother said to me, “He’s on call tonight, unfortunately for our bridge game.”

  Yes, of course…Mike had told me his father was a doctor. “What is his specialty?” I asked politely.

  “Orthopedics,” Mike answered for his mother who was staring off toward the muffled telephone conversation.

  She turned back to me. “I think our evening plans just changed.” She smiled. “Lucky for me I don’t get as annoyed as my mother. Do you know, when her plans were interrupted, when my father had to go on a call, she would stamp her foot and say she never got to go anywhere. Which wasn’t true, of course. She was just spoiled.”

  So her father had been a doctor too. Theirs would have been a proper household, a father with a good job, a mother who kept house and cared for the children, a couple with friends to fill their evenings in a world that could afford to spoil its women.

  I took two cashews, selecting them individually, carefully. And another sip from my glass. My hand, I noticed, was not quite steady.

  Mike’s father hung up the phone. “It makes you wonder.” He picked up his champagne glass and studied the slow stream of bubbles rising single file to the surface. “Last year I patched up a kid who’d smashed his legs in a motorcycle accident. Wild kid, the only question he ever asked was when he could get back on his bike. We sweated over him, I can tell you, and the lucky son of a bitch came out fine, didn’t even limp. Now he’s done it again, only worse. Skidded into a truck, the police say, and he’s a real mess.” He was talking directly to Mike, who was listening intently.

  “Drop me off on your way then,” Mike’s mother said, setting her glass on the tray. “I’ll take a cab home.”

  They left. Mike and I sat side by side on the couch in a quiet empty house. I poured more champagne. “There’s a second bottle.”

  “That is the second bottle.”

  “You did tell me your father was a doctor.”

  “I know I did.”

  “He wasn’t in any hurry to get to the hospital.”

  “No reason to. It takes a while to do the workups and get everything ready. He’ll be there in plenty of time.”

  “It must be awful to be a doctor. All guts and bones.”

  “I’m going to be a doctor.”

  “I forgot that.”

  “Of course I don’t have much choice. My grandfather, my father, and now it’s got to be me.”

  “I couldn’t stand having my life planned like that.”

  “That’s what your mother d
id. Exactly.”

  “She did not.”

  “Oh come on, now. Your mother’s an organizer. Before she even had a shop, way back when you were a child modeling her clothes, she knew exactly what you were going to do.”

  “How did you know I modeled for her when I was little?”

  “You told me. You told me lots of things.”

  Had I then indeed? I didn’t remember. “Clothes are beautiful things. Not like people’s insides.”

  “You’re just trying to flatter me.”

  We sat together in front of the TV and watched an NBA semifinal game and the late news. By then I’d drunk far too much to drive home, so I spent the night in the spare bedroom which had been Mike’s sister’s before she married and moved to Albuquerque. I don’t remember if we had sex.

  The next morning, waking in that unfamiliar room, I felt calm and detached. I seemed to move completely within myself, like a Chinese mummer inside a dragon costume. No one was awake yet; last night’s glasses were still in the living room. I made my bed neatly, convent-style, then slipped quietly out the front door to my car. It must have been very early, though I didn’t think to look at my watch.

  The streets were quiet and traffic on the expressway was light.

  At my mother’s house the garage was empty. Saturday was her busiest day; she and David always left shortly before six. By now she’d be prowling restlessly through her shops, seeing to the affairs of her kingdom. After leaving her, David would go to his cab company office, to check books and route sheets. One of the returning drivers would bring him coffee and doughnuts. (My mother never ate breakfast.) Then—early to avoid the crowds—he had a golf lesson with the pro at the municipal course. After that he played eighteen holes with a group of his friends. He’d be home in late afternoon, expansive and sweaty with beer and exertion, in time to shower and dress and pick up my mother.

  He loves her, I thought wonderingly. The idea had never occurred to me before. I wonder if she loves him.

  I parked in the empty garage, knocking down a rake and a neatly coiled garden hose. I did not pick them up.

  The kitchen was yellow and white, cheerful and cool, clear and clean. The gently moving air carried the faint petroleum smell of new filters. No one ever cooked here. There were no pots in the sparkling cupboards, no groceries on the shelves, no neatly wrapped packages in the freezer. The refrigerator held bottles of mineral water, the apple juice I had bought last week, and a six-pack of David’s favorite beer.