by Joan Opyr
“I’m certain,” she replied.
Abby had told me that thanks to the morphine, he was on the best drunk of his life. I hoped that was so. His breathing was so labored I thought every exhalation would be his last.
“We could also take him off the antibiotics,” she suggested.
“Yes, please do that.”
She gave me an encouraging nod. “It won’t be long now,” she said. “Please be assured that he’s comfortable and well cared for. Is he called Hunter or does he go by some other name?”
I smiled. “You’ve lived in the South for a while, haven’t you? No one ever seems to go by their actual name. They call me Poppy, but yes, he was Hunter.”
“He called me Dolly,” my grandmother said. “We were married for forty years. Then he up and left me for the Avon lady. Can you imagine? And he called, two weeks after he left, and he said that my order for some lipstick and a bottle of moisturizer had arrived and asked did I still want it. I told him to put it where the sun doesn’t shine.”
My mother bit her lip. I couldn’t tell if she wanted to choke Nana or laugh.
Dr. Adkins said, “Really. It’s very good of you to visit him and help your daughter and granddaughter.”
“Oh, I helped Barbara put him in the nursing home. He had senile dementia. Crazy as a bedbug, poor thing.”
I caught my mother’s eye. It was choke, not laugh.
“Nana,” I said. “I think we’d better go. Let’s have lunch somewhere.”
“There’s the hotdog stand at the flea market. We could eat there. Of course, it’s not as good since Cookie died. And they’ve doubled the prices on everything.”
“That’s okay. Mama,” I said. “If you’ll give me the keys, I’ll take Nana on down to the car. You can spend a minute or two up here by yourself.”
She nodded and handed me her purse. I ushered Nana out and closed the door behind us. I checked the monitor on the wall in the corner. The patient named Mallard was gone, but Bridges was still there. His green EKG line showed a steady heartbeat. So, for that matter, did Hunter’s.
“What happened to Mallard?” I asked Dr. Adkins.
“I’m afraid Mr. Mallard passed away,” she said.
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
Nana and I made our way down the hall. I pressed the elevator button and we stood there, waiting.
“This is the slowest elevator on earth,” she said. “I’d feel funny having a woman doctor, wouldn’t you?”
“What are you talking about?” I asked, exasperated. “I only have woman doctors. A woman surgeon took out my uterus.”
“It’s like having a woman minister,” Nana went on. “It just doesn’t seem right. If a woman married me, I wouldn’t feel married.”
“Don’t worry,” I replied. “There’s no woman on earth who wants to marry you.”
“This is your old stomping grounds,” my grandmother said. “Don’t you miss it?”
“No. I don’t miss the yellow jackets, either.”
The flea market at the state fairgrounds had expanded in the seventeen years since I’d worked there. In addition to the indoor booths, which were leased by vendors on long-term contracts, there were now two rows of outdoor stalls. These were operated week to week on a first-come, first-serve basis. Some were run by serious vendors, but most sold yard sale junk. We passed tables covered with rusty tools, empty picture frames, and children’s toys. The day had turned out fine. The temperature was in the mid-seventies and the sky was clear blue, not a cloud in sight. My mother stopped at a table displaying chipped china and boxes full of old silverware.
“Look,” she said, picking up a blue-and-white Staffordshire tea cup. “No saucer, a crack in the handle, and they want five dollars for it. They’re crazy.”
“Let’s go inside,” I said. “That’s where the good stuff is.”
Nana was examining a three-foot porcelain statue of a black poodle.
“You don’t need it,” my mother said.
“Doesn’t it look like Maurice,” Nana mused. “They only want forty-five dollars for it.”
“Only?”
The proprietor of the stall, a tall skinny man in his late fifties, addressed himself to Nana. “That’s bone china, ma’am. Made in England, not Japan.”
“Really?” Nana said, growing fluttery. “Is there a match to it? It looks like one of those things you put on either side of the fireplace. What are they called?”
“Andirons,” I said. “That isn’t an andiron.”
“It just might be,” the man said, carefully ignoring me. “That one doesn’t have a mate. I bought it at an estate sale from a woman who lived in a fine old house out in Cary. I tell you what; you can have it for forty. We’ll call it a sunny day special.” He grinned, showing off a mouth full of yellow teeth.
“In Cary, you say,” Nana began. “I know some folks in Cary. My sister and her husband live there. You might know them, Len and Thelma Price?”
The man stopped to ponder. Whether he knew them or not, if he were smart, he’d say he did. My grandmother was a sucker for sales patter.
“Do something,” my mother whispered. “We don’t need anymore junk.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Interrupt.”
“Nana,” I said. “Maurice was a standard poodle. That looks to me like a toy.”
“You think so?”
“I don’t know,” the man said. “It looks to me . . .”
“I know,” I said firmly. “We had a standard poodle once upon a time. A great big one. Let’s go inside, Nana. If the candy shop’s still there, I’ll buy you a pound of pecan fudge.”
“Oh,” she said, now thoroughly distracted. She smiled vaguely at the man. “I shouldn’t eat nuts with my dentures.”
“Then we’ll get plain chocolate,” I replied. “That’s my favorite, anyway.”
Nana put the dog down and led the way inside.
“Good work,” my mother said. “What a sweet tooth. She puts sugar on her sugar.”
I laughed. “Mom,” I said, holding the door open for her to pass through, “do you ever think about Tammy Carter?”
“Not if I can help it. What brought that up?”
“A dream I had last night.”
“Must’ve been a nightmare.”
“Who had a nightmare?” Nana asked.
“Me,” I said. “About the fact that you gave Hunter a second chance after the whole Tammy Carter business, and he blew that one, too.”
“Let that be a lesson to you,” my grandmother replied. “Never let the same dog bite you twice.”
Chapter Sixteen
I came home from the flea market every weekend with my fingers covered with yellow jacket stings. Yellow jackets were an occupational hazard at the outdoor concession stand. They clustered around the soft drink spigot, falling into the Cokes that I served. I’d gotten to be an expert at the surreptitious flick, knocking the bug out of the cup and snapping on the plastic lid before the customer noticed. There was no pouring drinks down the drain just because of a few floating hornets. My boss, Cookie Turnipseed, didn’t believe in waste. “What they don’t know won’t hurt’em,” he said.
Cookie was one of my grandfather’s customers at Bloom’s. He and his wife both drove brand new Cadillacs, so there must have been money to be made in hot dog stands and flea market junk stalls. Alva Turnipseed, Cookie’s wife, ran a booth that sold antiques, mostly old bedsteads and washstands she picked up at estate sales. She was a pinched and unpleasant woman, but I loved Cookie. He paid me in cash, five bucks an hour, with an extra twenty on top if business had been brisk.
The downside of work was that it left me tired. And stung.
Cookie gave me a ride home at five. He lived around the block from us in one of the brightly renovated houses in our rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. Our house was beginning to stand out for all the wrong reasons. We lived in an area called Oakwood. It had been nice in the Victorian era, g
rown dumpy after World War II, and was beginning to be nice again. First, people had moved in and begun restoring the Painted Ladies. Now there was an Oakwood Tour at Christmastime. Cookie’s house, a purpled majesty with a gingerbread turret, was on the tour; the Savas’ house could have been, but it wasn’t. Jean wasn’t reliable enough to risk it. She might be just fine, greeting her guests with grace and charm, and then again, she might be falling down drunk.
Dotted among the big houses with gentrification potential were smaller houses, like ours. We had hardwood floors and a sizable yard, but in the last few years, my grandfather had lost interest in keeping the place in good repair. The paint was flaking on the front of the house, and the fence listed out of true. During the sober work week, Hunter made occasional noises about fixing things, promises he forgot on the drunken weekends.
Cookie pulled into our driveway, and I felt the contrast between his prosperous car and our shabby house.
“Thanks for the ride, Cookie,” I said. He was always Cookie. Alva was always Mrs. Turnipseed.
“You’re welcome.” I opened the car door. “Wait,” he said. “You’re graduating soon, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“I’d like to give you something.” Cookie was generous with his cash. He’d put a hundred dollar bill in my Christmas card. I’d expected he’d do something similar for graduation. Instead, he said, “Mrs. Turnipseed and I have a little beach cottage down on Topsail Island. It’s nothing fancy. I like to fish. We aren’t using it the first week of June, and I don’t have anybody to rent it. I thought you might like to go down there with some of your friends.”
“Thank you, Cookie, but I probably can’t afford . . .”
“Free of charge,” he said, patting me on the knee. “That’s my present.”
“I don’t know what to say.” I did know what to say. Hot damn.
“I’ll give you a key at the end of May. You’re planning to go to college, aren’t you?” I nodded. “Good,” he said. “I wished I’d have gone. I might have spent my life doing something better for a living than flinging boiled hot dogs.”
I looked at him. He was the picture of success, the proverbial jolly fat man. Everyone loved him. He laughed a lot and told jokes on himself about his not quite undetectable toupee.
“Cookie, you couldn’t be more perfect if you had a Ph. D. from Harvard.”
He laughed. “I’ll have to tell Mrs. Turnipseed I have an admirer. See you next weekend. Put some meat tenderizer on those bee stings.”
I skipped the meat tenderizer. It always left a smell on my hands for hours afterward. Instead, I went straight in and took a long shower, letting the hot water pound on my back until the temperature grew tepid. It took me twice as long as usual to dress because I couldn’t decide what to wear. I finally settled on a black turtleneck, a shirt my grandmother hated because she thought it made me look older. The only pants I owned were jeans. I dug out the cleanest pair with the fewest holes and searched through the bottom of my closet for something other than my old Nikes. Faced with a choice between cowboy boots, sandals, and a pair of in-case-of-funeral pumps, I went for the boots. Satisfied that I looked nearly nineteen and maybe even twenty, I wandered into the living room to wait a seemly ten minutes before I went to Susan’s.
Everyone was out. My mother had left me a note on the dining room table saying that she and Nana had gone to the K & W Cafeteria for supper. My grandfather had disappeared at noon without a word to anyone, so if I wanted to stay at Susan’s again, that would be fine with her.
Maurice gazed at me expectantly. I dumped a can of Alpo into his food bowl. I sat down, flipped through a magazine, watched a minute and a half of The Andy Griffith Show, and paced the rest of my time away. Maurice stared at me balefully. I ignored him. He threw up on the carpet.
Still smelling of pine cleaner, I knocked on Susan’s door.
“Why did you leave this morning?” she said.
I was no longer afraid to look at her. Lying there naked, she was still marvelous to me. I couldn’t believe that I’d touched her, kissed her, held her close. Afterward, I’d tried to cover us both with a blanket, but she’d taken my hand and held it. She’d looked at me until I thought I was going to melt or burst into flames. She stroked my hair, pushing it back off my forehead.
“I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do.”
I didn’t answer. I wrapped my arms more tightly around her waist.
“I didn’t mean to frighten you,” she said.
“I wasn’t frightened.”
“Right,” she laughed. “That’s why you snuck out and ran back home.”
“I didn’t,” I began, but I stopped. “All right, I did.”
“It’s okay.”
“Is it?”
“Of course.”
Her skin was warm and slightly damp.
“Are you . . .” I tried to think of the best way to form the question I most wanted to ask. We’d said nothing until now, not a word from the moment she’d closed the front door behind me until we’d had to pull away from one another or fly into pieces.
Her eyes were dark blue. I met her gaze for a moment. Then I looked away. “You can’t say it, can you?”
“I can.”
“Then do it.”
I felt myself tensing up. I took a deep breath, willing my muscles to relax. “The guys you’ve dated. Did you do this with any of them?”
“Not this exactly.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yes, I know what you mean. Yes. Once. That was enough. For me and for him.”
“What about . . .” I paused. For God’s sake, I thought, out with it. “Has there been anyone like me?”
“Never like you. A woman, yes. My roommate freshman year. It didn’t last long. Do you remember her?”
“Vaguely. She came home with you once. A redhead with an English accent.”
“That’s the one.”
“What happened?”
“She went home to England.”
“Were you sad?”
“For a while. I missed her. She called for a few months, and then she met someone else.”
“Another woman?”
She nodded, and I sat up. I was surprised to see my reflection in the mirror on her dressing table. My cheeks were flushed, my eyes bright, my hair sticking out in every direction. My lips were swollen and red. I pulled the covers up to hide my bare chest.
Susan laughed. She put her hands behind her head and stared up at the ceiling. “Cheryl and I were together constantly. After she went home, I thought about going to England. A visit or a student exchange program, maybe.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“You ought to know. My mother. I can’t leave my dad to handle her on his own. I can live exactly as far away as Chapel Hill, where I’m out of the house and away from the everyday annoyance but can drive home at a moment’s notice. I can pour her into bed or take her off to another pointless spa to try and dry out.”
“What about . . .”
“Say it, Poppy.”
She took my hand and rested it in the hollow between her breasts. I felt her heartbeat and the rise and fall of her chest. Her breasts, like my own, were covered with red marks, a map of every place visited by mouth or hand.
“What about us, Susan? Why me?”
“Last night, everything seemed to fall into place. It was like the music of the spheres. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
“I don’t have a clue.” She pulled me back down and put her arms around me. “Unless you’re talking about those spheres Mick Fleetwood’s wearing in that poster.”
She laughed until I grew embarrassed and kissed her.
“You’ll be eighteen in August,” she said.
“And you’ll be twenty in November.”
She nodded. “In two years, I’ll graduate. Then four years of medical school, two years of residency, and I’ll be a doctor.”
“You’ll be twen
ty-eight.”
“I suppose so. What will you be, Poppy?”
“Twenty-six.”
“I know that. I mean what are your plans? You’re going to major in English.”
“I want to be a professor. I like to write. I think I’d like to teach.”
“So, that’s four years of college, two years for a Master’s, and four for a Ph.D. That’ll make you . . .”
“Twenty-eight,” I said. “Same as you.”
“Except that I’ll be thirty,” she laughed. One of her hands began tracing a path up my arm and over my right shoulder. “You have such a strong back. The muscles in your shoulders . . .”
“What about them?”
“They’re bigger than Brad’s.” I had moved my hand down to the curve of her hip, but this made me pull it back. “Stop that,” she said, replacing my hand. “That was a compliment. I’m glad you’re strong. You’re tall but you’re not bony. You’re not all knees and elbows.”
“I’m not feminine.”
“No,” she agreed, “you’re not. With your clothes and this new hair cut, you could pass for a boy.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Thanks a lot.”
“Well, what did you want to be? Scarlett O’Hara?”
“That would make my grandmother happy.”
She laughed. “Scarlett in bed with Melanie, I like that idea. Relax, Poppy. You’re perfect. You just need to get used to your own skin, stop listening to people who want to make a regular girl out of you. There are all sorts of ways to be a woman.”
“Not in my family, there aren’t.”
“Oh yes, there are. Your mother’s not exactly Scarlett herself.” Her fingers, which had been tracing small circles on my shoulder, stopped now and grabbed my arm. She gave me a shake. “You’ll never be a Southern belle, but you’re very attractive. Now stop fishing for compliments.”
Tomorrow, her parents would be back, and at the end of the week, she’d go back to Chapel Hill. There was something more I wanted to hear, something I wanted to ask her about. She traced her hand up the length of my spine, and I forgot what it was.
Chapter Seventeen