Can't Get Enough of Your Love

by J. J. Murray

  “No.”

  “City girls are like that.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Jenny was a country girl.” He smiled. “Hmm.” He wiggled the doorknob. “I’ll get you some locks, city girl.” He pushed the door, and it swung easily on its hinges. “Come on in.”

  I expected must, mildew, and decay. I expected bats to swoop down, critters to scurry, and cobwebs to block my path. I expected a nest of mice to look up, smile at me, and say, “How ya do in’?” But Jenny’s dollhouse was immaculate and smelled like pine, as if someone had sealed it with Saran Wrap.

  Directly in front of me were shiny wooden stairs rising to a landing before continuing to rise to the left. I stood on a sparkling red-and-brown print linoleum floor. To the left of the stairs, four high-backed chairs surrounded a rough-hewn oak table shellacked to a glassy shine. The rest of the ground floor, it seemed, was the kitchen.

  “Big, ain’t it? Jenny loved to cook.” He rubbed his stomach for effect. “I used to be a bit larger. Jenny could cook all day, and I could eat her cooking all night. Storage room’s behind that door there. Bedrooms, bath, and sitting room are upstairs. Do you like to cook?”

  “Yes.” And I do more cooking in the kitchen than in the bedroom. And trust me, that oak table is sturdy enough for two people to, um, entertain each other on.

  He showed me the little four-burner electric stove, the oak cabinets that needed refinishing, the skinny but adequate “icebox,” and the shiny sink and the plumbing underneath. Every cabinet contained pots, pans, and glasses, and each drawer bulged with silverware and other cooking utensils. The ad didn’t say it was a completely furnished cottage. I have saved so much money because of that.

  “I did everything myself,” he said. “And I passed all the inspections the first time. You got a microwave?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Just as well. It ain’t cooking at all, you ask me, and the electric couldn’t handle it, anyway.” He opened the storage room door and reached into the darkness, grabbing and pulling a string.

  “Let there be light,” I said.

  He turned to me sharply. “Are you a religious gal?”

  “I pray a lot.” And I do. Hell, it can’t hurt, right? Izzie says I call on Jesus only when I’m getting my swerve on. I call on Him other times, too, like when the Rabbit won’t start on the first try on a cold day, or when I’m late for something and the jerk in front of me is creeping along at the damn speed limit.

  “Hmm. Jenny would have liked you.” He winked at me. “I haven’t yet reformed.”

  I followed him into the room, extremely large for a storage room. “This is your oil heater, though you won’t need it because of the woodstove. There’s your water tank and pump, and this is your woodstove. Puts out a nice, even heat throughout the house once you cut off the generator.”

  That explained all the wood in the barn.

  “The fuse box over there needs to be updated, but I’ll take care of that. I’ve left that space over there so you could have a washer and dryer one day. I’ll have someone inspect the well and the septic. They ought to pass.” He tapped the top of the woodstove. “This is my greatest invention.”

  The woodstove didn’t look that different from any other. Squat, cast iron, a grate, a large pipe up, and … a dozen little silver pipes snaking in and out.

  “You’ve noticed the pipes, haven’t you?” He blew some dust off some pipes going into and out of the back of the stove. “As you’ve probably figured out, if you shut off the generator, you shut off your ability to have hot water.”

  I hadn’t noticed, but I nodded as if I had.

  “Jenny hated taking cold baths in the morning, especially in the winter, so what I did was run these pipes from the water tank to the woodstove and back. Now, all the water in this house has to pass through this stove.”

  “Does that mean I have to keep the stove going all summer?”

  He smiled. “No. Once you turn on the generator, the water heats up to a hundred forty in about half an hour. If you’re like Jenny, though, you’ll want your bath as soon as you wake up, so you’ll have to go out to the barn at least thirty minutes before your bath. You got anywhere you got to be?”

  “No. I’m on spring break.”

  “Are you a student?”

  I couldn’t tell him “teacher’s aide” and expect him to rent the cottage to me. “No, I’m a teacher at Patrick Henry.” And I sort of am.

  “A young thing like you?”

  I blushed. I like getting hit on, even if the man has wrinkles older than I am. “Yes.”

  He smiled. “Any questions so far?”

  I had yet to see a phone or a phone jack. “How would I make a phone call?”

  He furrowed his gray eyebrows. “Well, you dial the number on a telephone.”

  “No. I mean, is there a phone here?”

  “Oh. No. We never had one here.” Mr. Wilson raised his eyebrows. “You’d have to call from Gordon’s Store out on four sixty.”

  I pulled out my cell phone. “I have a cell phone.”

  And the charges are a killer! I’m twenty miles from Roanoke, a decent-sized Virginia city, but all my calls are out of the network until I hit the Roanoke County line.

  “Let’s see the rest of the house,” he said.

  Upstairs, first door on the right, was the sitting room. “Just for sitting, reading,” he said.

  And entertaining in a small space when we’re too, um, caught up to make it to the bedroom.

  A beige two-seater sofa centered the left wall, identical brass lamp stand/magazine racks on either side, a matching easy chair hugging the far right corner near a bookcase. Framed needlepoint pastoral scenes were spaced around the room.

  “Jenny and her needlepoint, and she never used a pattern,” he said, rocking in the easy chair.

  I want to remove those scenes of cows, horses, and sheep, I really do, but I’m afraid Jenny will return from the grave (or from under a beech tree somewhere) to visit me. I don’t say “Jenny” three times in a mirror, either.

  I squatted at the bookcase and found it filled with Reader’s Digests starting in 1957 and ending in 1972.

  “We stopped subscribing for some reason or other. It might have been Watergate. Either that or we simply couldn’t get any more of ‘em packed in there.” Beige drapes shrouded the windows, one of which faced the road, the other the barn. “We usually kept these drapes closed. Not much of a view. Except for each other, that is.”

  I’ve replaced all those dusty Reader’s Digests with Essence, Honey, and O magazine. Oprah is one of my role models, and I plan to stay unmarried like her until I’m fifty. The other magazines are to help me know what I should look like, as if that will ever happen. I flip through those glossy pages and shake my head mostly. Where do they find these flawlessly skinned, buxom black women with perfect teeth, nails, and hair? I’ve never met any of them. They must live outside Virginia or something. Roger wrote me a poem about my “issues” with these women called “She Is Beautiful.”

  When she wakes,

  she is beautiful,

  flashing a little leg

  and yawning shyly,

  her mouth a delicate O.

  When she does her hair,

  she is beautiful,

  Golden Hotting with practiced hands

  around tender ears,

  steam rising into the air.

  When she sings,

  she is beautiful,

  flashing teeth and singing strong,

  her neck arched as her lips

  whisper sweetness into the air.

  When she bites her lower lip,

  she is beautiful,

  softening bad news

  with wide eyes and a pout.

  When she plays football,

  she is beautiful,

  flashing hands, arms, and legs

  as the dust and turf fly

  behind her.

  When she swats the remote control fro
m

  my hand to hold my hand,

  she is beautiful,

  sighing to tell me she wants to hold

  more than my attention later tonight.

  And when she walks,

  Lord God!,

  she is beautiful,

  swaying with hips and legs and back

  in time to a rhythm she wants

  only me to hear.

  I don’t need a magazine

  to tell me

  she is beautiful

  because,

  her body, soul, and mind

  fill all the glossy pages

  of my heart.

  I have the poem, um, hidden between the mattress and box spring of my bed. I doubt Juan Carlos or Karl would appreciate it as much as I do. I sometimes take it out to feel special when I’m alone.

  Opposite the sitting room was a bedroom in navy blue. Two bookcases housed quite a collection of African-American books by Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright, among others. A simple gray-and-blue quilt lay neatly folded at the foot of a single bed.

  “Believe it or not,” Mr. Wilson called out as he rocked, “we stacked all three of our boys in there using a bunk bed and that little bed. They were hardly in here except to sleep, of course. As soon as they were grown and gone, I turned it into my reading room. It was also where I slept when I came in too late.”

  Everything in the room matched. The dresser, mirror, nightstand, and headboard were whitewashed pine, matching the color of the drapes. The window provided a nice view of the pond.

  “Hope you don’t mind if I rest a bit,” Mr. Wilson said. “You won’t get lost.”

  I have touched all the books in that reading room, finishing every single one, and when I have my four children (and I will—and they all will play football), I will name them James, Langston, Richard, and Zora. Hell, I might name them all Zora, even if they’re all boys. I’ll have Zora James, Zora Langston, Zora Richard, and Zora Zora. They’ll be called “The Four Z’s,” and I’ll have the TV cameras on me whenever they win the national championship or the Super Bowl. I won’t wear embarrassing clothing that proclaims they’re mine, though, nor will I overdo the bling like some of these women do. I saw the mama of one basketball player looking like a hood rat, her hair a mass of extensions, wearing his jersey. Scary.

  I continued down the hall, opening the first door I came to on the right. I entered a huge closet filled with old women’s clothes, shoes, and hats, all encased in plastic. At the time, I thought, Grandma Lula lived here? At the far end of the closet was a window with a nice view of the woods. If I removed all the clothes, this closet with a window could be my office or my studio. Not that I needed either. I just thought it would be cool to say that I had one. Now, however, it’s still a closet, filled mostly with shoe boxes.

  “I’ll get all Jenny’s clothes out of there,” Mr. Wilson called out.

  I left the closet and crossed the hall to a larger bedroom to see a queen-size bed. But everything was too yellow. The bedspread, the drapes on two windows, the quilt, and even the wastebasket were shades of yellow.

  “Bright in here, isn’t it?”

  I jumped. Mr. Wilson was in the doorway behind me. Country folks can be sneaky like that. “Yes, sir.”

  “Jenny’s favorite color. She loved lemons, daffodils, and bananas, too.” He stepped to a window. “The best views of the pond are from this room. We used to watch sunsets in here.”

  I was in a shrine to Jenny Wilson. Her combs and brushes were still lined up in front of the mirror on the dresser.

  He crossed the room to a small closet door and opened it. “Well, looky here. All my old suits.” He pulled out a black suit on a hanger and held it in front of him. There was no way it would fit him now. “Jenny liked me plump.” He returned the suit to the closet. “I’ll get these out of here, too. Check out the bathroom.”

  The bathroom was a simple white. A beige room, then a blue room, then a yellow room, then a white room—Jenny’s dollhouse had simple colors for a simple home. I opened the only closet in the bathroom and saw stacks of towels and sheets. I pulled back the shower curtain and laughed when I saw a window.

  “You laughing at my window? There didn’t used to be a window there. I mean, who puts a window in a shower?”

  “Exhibitionists?” I had wanted to say.

  “I put that there for a reason.” He leaned on the edge of a simple pedestal sink, a mirrored medicine cabinet above. “Jenny’s greatest fear was that one of our children would fall off that dock out there and drown, even though all of them could swim just fine and that pond isn’t but seven or eight feet deep at its deepest. My oldest, Thaddeus, he used to get up before sunrise every morning and fish off that dock for his breakfast. He usually caught something worth eating, sunfish mostly. Anyway, this was the only room in the house without a window, so I cut windows for her over the tub and over there beside the toilet.”

  I have a heavy curtain on the window next to the toilet, but nothing covers the window in the shower. It’s not as if anyone’s out here looking at me, and, well, it gives me a cheap thrill every morning to know that someone could see my girls in all their soapy glory.

  “What kind of rent are you paying back there in the city?”

  I groaned inside. “Three hundred a month.” That I had to pay to my mama for half a house note and half of the utilities and groceries.

  “That much? Times sure have changed. I won’t charge you that much for this old barn, though. It wouldn’t be right.”

  I tried to keep my eyes from popping out of their sockets. A furnished two-bedroom cottage on a pond with acres and acres of privacy and solitude for less than three hundred dollars a month?

  “What do you think is fair?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “Mr. Wilson, a place like this would go for up to a thousand dollars a month or more down at Smith Mountain Lake.”

  “You don’t say. Hmm.”

  I regretted telling him that the second I said it, but then …

  “Tell you what. You pay me what you think is fair minus whatever work you do on the place. With the amount of work that needs to be done around here, I may as well rent it to you for nothing. Have you seen anything that needs fixing?”

  My eyes did pop then. For nothing? Was he kidding? “Um, not much inside needs fixing, though those cabinets could use some refinishing.” And Karl would be the man to do it. He likes working with his hands. He’s good with his wood, too.

  Mr. Wilson nodded. “How about outside?”

  I told him my plans for the grass, the sidewalk, the dock, and the brush along the road. He listened, nodding often. It was strange, but in a way, Mr. Wilson had been interviewing me all along to be the caretaker of Jenny’s dollhouse.

  “You could get up a garden somewhere, too,” he said. “The richest soil in the world is around here. You’ll also want to chop some more wood, keep a fresh cord drying out.” The light in the bathroom flickered and died. “Surprised Sheila lasted as long as she did. Not bad for ten-year-old gas, huh?”

  We walked down the stairs and out the front door. “When can I move in?”

  “How about now?”

  “Great. Do you have a lease I can sign?”

  “I trust you. Just stick the money in my mailbox, say, the first of every month?”

  “Okay.” This was too easy. “Um, don’t I need to pay a damage deposit or something?”

  “What for?”

  “In case I damage something.”

  He shook his head. “This cottage has been standing since just after the Civil War. It can survive anything.”

  We waded through the grass to the Rabbit, the horizon teeming with bulbous black clouds. “It is going to rain something fierce,” he said. “Maybe you ought to wait till tomorrow to move in.”

  “I don’t have much to move.” That belonged only to me. One trip with the Rabbit, mainly with clothes and shoe boxes, was all it took.

&n
bsp; “Suit yourself. I’ll reveal all of Sheila’s secrets to you when you move in, and since the house is open, you can move in any time it’s convenient for you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  We got in the car. “No, really, Mr. Wilson. Thank you. This is a miracle.”

  “Just take care of the dollhouse and Jenny will take care of you,” he said. He pulled his hat down and took a snooze until we reached the farmhouse, and I didn’t take a single wrong turn on the way back to his farm.

  I shook him gently after I parked. A few raindrops plopped down.

  “It’s fixing to be a real bad storm,” he said as he got out of the car. “A bad storm with heavy rain, maybe with hail. You better be getting back to Roanoke. Best you not move in until all this passes, Ms. Cole. I’ll have the place ready for you. The day you’re ready to move in, you just go on and move in.”

  “Shouldn’t I call you first?”

  He shook his head. “Jenny will tell me.”

  And with that, I roared away as the rain thickened, the wind picked up, and hail filled the air.

  Chapter 5

  I moved in two days later after first surviving a hail of words from Mama.

  I would have moved in the very next day, but I just had to have an argument with Mama. I’m sure it’s in some “how to raise your mama” book. First, you have to shock your mama with “Mama, I’m moving out after twenty-five years of sponging off you.” Second, you have to watch her mouth drop to the floor. You will be amazed how far a mama’s mouth can drop, and when it comes back up, it has dust bunnies all up in it. Third, you have to begin packing as the lecture rages all around you and keep packing no matter how much sense she makes.

  It was actually one of the better moments in my life. “After twenty-five years,” Mama raged, “twenty-five years! You suddenly get it into your head, just suddenly get it into your head, to go off on your own, just go off on your own….”

  Mama has this need to repeat everything twice, the second time louder. She has conversations with herself like this all the time, even when she’s asleep and even when she prays. I wonder if God hears her original prayers, or does He hear the echoes? I’ll bet He hears the echoes. They’re always louder.