“You are truly a genius, my love,” Lonnie, her one and only legal husband, used to say. He said this on many occasions, but especially after she created Ceramic Meats. These are hand-painted, perfectly cast replicas of main dishes: turkeys, hams, and Quee’s favorite, the crown pork roast. They are for the vegetarians of the world or those who just hate having all that leftover mess of critter parts to deal with. This centerpiece has tiny holes throughout so that you can light a candle (made to smell like the fat of whatever animal has been duplicated), and there in the center of your table you get the steamed-up smell of the meat you are not about to thank anybody for or eat. Genius is not even the word. “Who are you, really?” an old lover of hers once asked. They were still in the bed, the sheets damp and sandy. “Who do you want me to be?” she asked.
Now some jerk from a big department store has stolen her ceramic meat idea and made a killing in the Northeast. So be it. If one idea was all she had, she wouldn’t be much now, would she? She is sprucing up the pink room for the Spandex Poet, also known as Ruthie Crow, who will arrive later today, when she hears a car door in the drive. She lifts up the mattress and places a golfball under it (Ruthie Crow is NO princess for sure) and then she goes and opens the door. It’s Alicia, poor thing, she is a mess. Her hair hasn’t been washed, and her eyes are all puffy. She is way too thin; the little two-year-old, Taylor, perched on her hip looks enormous in comparison. He has his daddy’s handsome full face and big brown eyes.
“Jones never came home,” Alicia says. “All night long I kept getting these calls, silence and breathing.” She puts Taylor on the floor and eases down on the bench of Quee’s prize oak hall tree that supposedly was once owned by the royal family, or so the man who runs and operates Fulton Antiques and Oddities said. Of course the old fool was lying, but who cares. She likes the furniture purely because it was a big solid hunk of oak, wood cut from a tree that must have been standing in the seventeen hundreds, if indeed it was as old as the man had said. Tommy Lowe refinished it for her and found a penny dated 1905 in one of the drawers.
“Was it that girlfriend?”
“I suppose so.” Alicia bends forward and sobs, the heels of her little granny boots scratching up against the front of the hall tree. Taylor stands over by Quee’s big fat cat, Pussy Galore, and strokes her fur while watching his mother. Lonnie named her. He loved those James Bond movies. They’d go to bed, and he’d say with an awfully bad accent, “The name is Purdy, Lonnie Purdy,” and she would laugh and immediately pull down his baggy old pajama pants.
“So he’s not with her.”
“I don’t know, Quee.” Alicia looks up, the skin beneath her pale blue eyes so fragile-looking, tiny lines and capillaries like an insect’s wing. “I mean could something have really happened? He usually at least calls.” Taylor stares at her, scared like a little animal. “God,” she whispers, her hand waving out to Taylor as a distraction of his attention. “I catch myself hoping . . .”
“I know baby, you’ve said that before.” Quee goes and gets a little chewy treat for Taylor to give to Miss Pussy Galore. She tells him to see if he can get the kitty to do her trick of jumping on top of the wide-screen TV in the other room; that Sesame Street or some such must be on about now. When Taylor has disappeared around the corner, Quee turns back to Alicia. “Don’t feel guilty for thinking it, either.”
“Really?”
“Yes.” Quee takes Alicia by the shoulders, and she feels as limp as a rag doll. Quee would like to shake the shit out of her, she’d like to say, WAKE UP! but she just waits for Alicia to stand a little taller and look her in the eyes. “I told you how he came around here one night last year, asking about you like you might have been his pet dog.”
“You never told me exactly what happened.”
“No, and I don’t need to. He’s trash.”
“Why did I ever marry him?” Alicia shakes her head back and forth, limp blond hair falling forward. She needs to wipe her nose but sits there helpless and lost-looking.
“You were young,” Quee says, ignoring the tinkling of the DJ’s bell, which probably means he wants his goddamn back rubbed again. Yes, yes, it’s what she has promised to the people who check in, but shit, has he no shame? “And Jones Jameson is a looker, no doubt about it.”
“Who cares?”
“You did.” Quee goes down the hall and in her sweet as a sugar plum tart voice says at the DJ’s door that she is heating up the oil for his little rub right this sec. Turning back to Alicia, she says, “You cared. You probably couldn’t believe that he was even interested in you.” Quee waits for Alicia to look up, waits to catch the truth in those pale eyes before she goes to heat up the special massage oil (lard with sprinkles of Tabu—cheap as all get out), which she bottles in a fine china carafe that was owned by Napoleon’s cousin-in-law or so the junque (he insists that if you ever have desire to use such a word that you spell it with a “q”) man said.
“You grew up out there in the county where a double-wide trailer is considered high class, and here was this young, well-to-do, college-educated playboy who had screwed every little debutante and sorority girl in the state, and he was interested in you.”
“My parents had a house. A nice clean house with a yard.”
“Alicia, honey, a point. I was making a point. I’m saying that it’s not unusual for people to fall in love with what they think others are falling in love with.” Quee stirs the oil and glances down the other hall that leads to her private part of the house. It is a sanctuary, that part of the house. It is where she goes to fill herself up with the goodness that gets siphoned out of her over the course of a day. “I’m sure you were flattered when he asked you out. You were probably flattered when he wanted to sleep with you. You probably thought he was doing you some big favor.”
“I don’t know.” She shakes her head, shrugs. Quee knows. She knows that’s what happened. She saw that son of a bitch sowing his oats all through his high school years. Nice girls went out with him just because his daddy owned an oil company. She had dealt with many of the young women who had the pleasure of him pumping and slobbering on top of them.
Quee was at their wedding, and Alicia never even made the connection until Quee told her. At the time, Quee had quite a lucrative cake-designing business, and there she was setting up all the layers into what came to resemble a beautiful white swan, the little stand-up bride and groom riding on its back like when Thumbelina and the prince sail away into a happy life. She had come up with the idea herself, relying on a memory of the swan boats in Boston, a memory of breakfast at the Ritz, following a night of love-making in a Holiday Inn out on the turnpike. Lonnie had no idea why she was so interested in swans, and he kept asking why a swan instead of a dove. A dove, after all, was white and was a universal symbol of love, not to mention the role the cute little cooer played in Noah and the Ark: life, prosperity. Lonnie was quite the eclectic reader, and she adored him for it. She finally said she chose the swan because she had always felt like an ugly duckling herself and loved when it turned into a beautiful swan. She told Lonnie that if swans talked English, then that one had said, So fuck all you ducks who think you’re something special.
“But you were never a duckling,” he said. “Not that I ever saw at least.”
“I was, honey. Once upon a time I sure was.”
“You are the loveliest bird of all,” he said at the reception, while she watched over her cake, making sure that no one tried to cut that perfectly curved, creamy white neck. She watched Jones Jameson with disgust as he leapt onto stage with the band he had brought in from Raleigh, a beer can in his hand, and began singing into the mike. He had already been hired over at WQTB and had told enough jokes to set the town on fire; he talked about somebody at the station who niggerlipped his smokes, and he said he knew this lucky old guy whose woman could suck a golfball through a garden hose. He asked the band to play that song “If You Want to Be Happy for the Rest of Your Life.” “Never make a pretty
woman your wife,” he sang while Alicia was in the bathroom changing into her little linen going-away suit that had probably set her back a couple of weeks’ pay at the courthouse where she worked as a social worker. Quee hated him. As far as she was concerned, he was the type who gets entirely too far in this world. Alicia’s poor old daddy spent the whole reception leaned against the wall with his hand in a loose fist. He looked like an old farmer come to town.
“Me poopooed,” Taylor says now and runs into the room, reaches his arms out to his skeletal mother who shakes her head and sighs, as if she has no idea what to do next.
“I know,” Quee says and takes Taylor by the hand. “Go tell Mr. Radio that I’m on my way. Ask him if he knows where your husband might have been all night. I’ll change this diaper. I’ll change this little stinky critter boy, oh yes I will, you know I will.” She lifts Taylor, holding her breath as she hugs him close. “Let’s go in the bathroom, lovey dovey, little ripe one, little love.” She puts him down on her pink satin chaise over by the window. This is the business bathroom, designed for relaxation and the feel of somebody’s living room rather than a john where somebody might feel inclined to have a quick smoke and flush. Tommy Lowe had planned the expansion himself, a lovely bay area of glass that surrounds the Jacuzzi. Tommy said he was building his dream bathroom, so she invited him to come in and use it anytime he took a notion; she said he needed to give up the cigs anyway. Now Taylor is pulling on her necklace, an amber heart that Lonnie gave her when they got married. He had just been reading all about it, about fossils preserved in amber, bones and wings and hair. He said he hoped that they were around long enough to be considered fossils. “Like what if some people thousands of years from now take a crowbar and pop off our bedroom door and find us spooned there.” He was following her through the house with this long saga of his. “Then they might take our bed with us in it and set it up in a museum and people will pass by and see us there all snuggled and think ‘That could be me.’ The sign would say: A Loving Marriage. Typical man and woman in a typical town in a typical year.”
“Who’s precious? Who’s a precious boy?” she asks suddenly, needing to turn away from that image of Lonnie in her mind.
“Me am,” Taylor says and slaps his plump hand up to Quee’s cheek. “Me a kitty, rrrrrr.”
“Me a cat,” she says back in baby talk. “Me a cat with long claws and waving tail.” She leans herself away from Taylor as she pulls down his tiny little jeans and reaches for the baby wipes that Alicia keeps beneath the sink. “Me love you little kitty,” she purrs to him. She is feeling relief for this child, relief that maybe this time Alicia will get a clean start, that he has a chance of a decent happy life without the influence of somebody so full of hatred. She pulls up his pants and leads him back to the TV while she goes and tends to the diaper, carries it out back to where she has four cans lined up on a concrete block. All four cans are full, as they always are on Thursdays when the men come to haul it all off. Lonnie once told Quee that she heard the trash truck before the neighborhood dogs did.
“I’ve got a nose for trash all right,” she had told him. She has said the same thing in so many words to Alicia about her husband. Quee stands out in the side yard and listens. Sure enough, she can hear the truck coming. It’s probably a block away. She breathes in deeply, good clean autumn air, crisp blue sky. For some reason, it makes her think again of Lonnie and the early years with him. She thinks of the chicken pot pies they ate every day when he came in from the bank for lunch. She can almost smell those pot pies, the oilcloth on the kitchen table. Whatever happened to those dishes they had then? Awful chipped-up dishes with roosters, matching salt and pepper shakers, the salt one partly filled with rice to absorb the moisture. All those years she craved wildness, so who would’ve thought she’d be thinking of such things right now.
“Where are you, Lonnie?” she whispers in her head. “If you are looking at me you must be thinking, Quee, you’ve flipped. You’ve lost your lovely mind, my pet. Or did you always think that, Lonnie? Sometimes I can’t help but think you knew everything, even while you were right here on earth.”
A big gust of wind shakes the pecan tree, and there’s the thud of a nut on the garage roof. She can see Tommy Lowe’s shadow there in the window where he’s working on the closet. He just comes and goes on his own without ever disturbing her, that big old collie of his seated politely on the front seat of his truck, a pack of cigarettes on the dash. She’ll get HIM in the clinic before it’s all over; she’d love nothing better than to work her hands over those lean limbs, the tight ropey muscles of his smooth brown back. She once hinted to Alicia that Tommy Lowe was the kind of man she ought to find—handsome and good-hearted, forget that he lives like he’s in a national park. As if he has heard her thoughts, he pulls back the curtains and waves to her. She blows him a kiss and begins hauling her trash cans down to the curb. There was a time when the garbage men would come up into your yard and empty the cans there, but now folks are required to take the trash to them out on the street. No skin off of her nose. She’d just as soon they not be snooping around her side yard, stepping on her shrubs and seeing whatever lingerie she might have on her clothesline, anyway.
“You better hold your breath on this one,” she says and laughs. “Take it and then drive as fast as you can.”
“You bet,” the old trash collector says, a wad of tobacco in his jaw, and heaves her cans up and into the back of that stinking truck. He reminds her of somebody, and she’s not sure if it’s of a real person or of somebody off of her special wall, a wall filled with faces of strangers, old family photos that she has purchased from the junque man, who tries to pass them off as royalty, or at least of big money from Raleigh or murderers who disappeared to Texas. Just last week Alicia confessed that the photographs gave her the creeps, that she feared their karma could leak right out and into the house. Quee, who had once dabbled in real estate, told her that she had a good sense of bad karma and had never felt a thing but benevolence from her acquired orphans.
“Even him?” Alicia asked and pointed to one of three portraits of the same gruff-looking man. Quee had said herself that he must’ve been some kind of son of a bitch for his family to sell off three of his portraits. She named him Oscar after the Grouch on Sesame Street; Taylor loved the Grouch, and Quee loves the idea of somebody making his home in a trash can. It has the same romantic appeal for her that little greasy-looking windows over gas stations always have, the notion that you could go in and have yourself a nice little apartment there, something that no one would ever suspect. You could have this beautiful life housed behind something grimy and cheap.
“He sure doesn’t look so benevolent to me.” Alicia kept glancing back at Oscar like she expected him to jump out and yell “Boo!” at any minute. Alicia has a pretty smile when it surfaces, timid and sweet, and Quee can only imagine that a man as awful as Jones Jameson must get some sexual kick from such a look. A sweet, smart woman reduced to ninety pounds of frayed nerve, a woman so jumpy that she won’t even make eye contact with photographs if she can help it.
“Oh, honey, Oscar isn’t bad at all.” Quee started to say that compared to what’s leaking into Alicia’s own house from her own oozing husband, Oscar could be put up for sainthood. She started to say that Alicia should watch that movie where Farrah Fawcett burns up her husband’s bed with him in it, but instead she told the story of Oscar as it had come to her, how Oscar was an immigrant, more or less, seeing as how he had no family in the area. Oscar loved the warm Southern weather, and he liked to stretch out like a cat in the sun and feel the heat on his face; he liked the squiggly red pictures that the bright sun etched into his closed eyelids. But most of all, Oscar loved a woman by the name of Emma, who had taken a neighborly interest in his welfare. He sensed a sadness in her, a loss they both knew. He loved the way she smelled like the pear preserves she was famous for making. He loved the way her hands moved gracefully over the banister of his porchrail. He loved h
er dark, thick hair that hung down her back like a young girl, even though she was a grown-up woman with a husband.
“Yes, poor, poor Oscar,” Quee had said, surprised to see the solemn, totally believing look on Alicia’s face. “He lived for the love he could never have, sustained on the crumbs she tossed his way, a loaf of bread, pear preserves, a muffler knitted at Christmas, the time they . . . Oh never mind,” she said. “You don’t care about Oscar.”
“But I do,” Alicia said. “I was wrong.” And then she realized the absurdity of her affirmation, this faith and acceptance, sympathy and hope, for something created out of thin air.
“It’s very easy to be wrong about a person’s life,” Quee whispered, wishing she could shake some sense into the girl so that she’d take her baby and get the hell out of her marriage. That seems like ages ago even though it was just last week.
NOW QUEE STANDS in the doorway and watches Alicia pacing and twisting the phone cord. “He said he was going to Raleigh,” she says, and then is quiet, shakes her head as if the person on the other end can see her responding. “I have no idea, Officer. He said it was a radio reunion or something, that’s all.” She leans forward and picks up one of Taylor’s little cars, runs it along the edge of the sink. “A gold Audi 5000. Yes.” She pauses and her face turns red. “His vanity plate says IM2SEXY. Yes, yes.” She hangs up the phone and feels her way into one of the kitchen chairs.
Carolina Moon Page 4