The Orange Blossom Special

by Betsy Carter

  In the bubble above the man’s head, it said, “Oh Dottie, this is nothing. Wait until you taste my veal cacciatore.” The sketches were drawn in the same clean and tight style as the Jai Alai symbol of the man jumping in the air with the cesta strapped to his arm.

  When Barone came to the door on Saturday night, his arms filled with grocery bags, Tessie was dressed more casually than the last time. She wore her dungarees and a red-and-white-checked blouse with a Peter Pan collar. No pearls. Red slippers on her feet.

  The screen door slammed behind him as he stepped inside the house. “Nice to see you,” said Tessie, her arms folded in front of her. Barone put the bags on the floor and thrust his head forward like a turtle coming out of its shell. “Polka Dottie in squares!” he said. He kept staring at her. “And wait a minute, those bangs—Christ almighty you are a sight to behold.” As Barone pulled her toward him, he was overpowered by the odor of Spray Net. “You look so beautiful, I don’t even mind that you smell like ether,” he said, his lips sticking to lacquered pieces of her hair.

  Tessie had promised herself that she wouldn’t get “physically involved” with Barone until after they had a conversation. And maybe, after that particular conversation, they would never get “physically involved” again. He kissed her collarbone and ran his fingers down the sides of her breast. Her resolve weakened.

  “So what’s for dinner?” she asked, trying to sound as if it mattered.

  “Mmm, dinner,” he murmured. “Let’s have dessert first.”

  “No, really,” she said, more adamantly. “I’m hungry. What’s for dinner?”

  “Okay, dinner.” Barone slid his hands down Tessie’s sides until he was holding her around the waist. “Iceberg lettuce with blue cheese dressing; Beef Stroganoff with a side of noodles and butter, Apple Brown Betty for dessert, and a wonderful bottle of French Beaujolais.”

  Tessie had never tasted Beef Stroganoff. Or French Beaujolais. She tried to think of something to say that wouldn’t betray her lack of sophistication. “Noodles, I love noodles. What kind?”

  “I know a hungry gal when I see one,” said Barone. “Let’s cook.”

  For the next thirty minutes, Tessie watched Barone chop onions, whisk flour, mix up a salad dressing. She noticed the curly little veins in his wrist and natural grace with which he wielded a knife. The only mushrooms Tessie ever had came from a can. They had a slippery texture and no taste at all. Barone had brought a small bag filled with real mushrooms. Carefully, he wiped the grit off of each one and sliced them in thin slivers that looked like the columns outside the Victorians in Carbondale. Then he sautéed them in butter. These things, they smelled sweet and earthy unlike anything she had ever smelled. Barone moved around the kitchen as if he’d been there a thousand times before. Sometimes he hummed, but mostly he let the sounds of the crackling butter and the odor of onions frying and meat roasting do the talking for him.

  Tessie set the table with her white dishes, so worn and plain for this meal. She stepped into the front yard and snipped some hibiscus from the bush, hoping that their gaudiness would make her utilitarian Formica table a little more festive. Damn, she didn’t even have proper wine glasses. That was a laugh. For all the wine she drank, all she had were dumb old jelly glasses. She’d put out the ones without bears on them hoping Barone wouldn’t notice. Oh wait, the silver candlesticks she and Jerry had gotten for the wedding. God knows, she hadn’t had any use for them in years. There were still some white stubs of candle left and in the dim light, maybe he wouldn’t notice how tarnished they were.

  “You sit now,” he said.

  He served her the beef with the thick sour cream, butter and mushrooms and noodles; and against her will, she wondered what Jerry would think if he could see her sitting here, her face flushed in candlelight with this food, this wine, this man.

  Barone poured generous helpings of the wine into each jelly glass. “To Polka Dottie in circles, squares, and whatever other shapes you come in,” he toasted.

  Tessie clinked her glass against his. She remembered his last note. “I knew you were tall, dark, and handsome. But this too?” It was confusing having both men in her mind at the same time. The notion that somehow their notes might cross made her smile, but she didn’t dare speak her thoughts out loud.

  Instead, they talked about the week, about Dinah going to camp, about Victoria Landy. “If her brains were as big as her ass, she’d be the better for it,” he said. They drank more Beaujolais.

  Tessie waited for the wine to take her to that warm and sure place. Then it was just a matter of finding the right moment, which finally came when Barone did his imitation of a velvet-voiced disc jockey on a local radio station. “It’s Saturday night, date night in Miami, and I send this next song, Paul Anka’s ‘Put Your Head on My Shoulder,’ out to all the lovebirds on the beach, in a car, robbing a 7-Eleven, or simply getting drunk at home.” He watched her face, waiting for her to laugh.

  “So what are you doing here on a date night?” She heard her voice get starchy. “I mean, what about Mrs. Antonucci? Where does she think you are?”

  Barone’s face went dark, accentuating the deep furrows that, in the light of the candles, made him look every one of his fifty-four years. He ran his hand over his mouth as if trying to hold back the words.

  “Tessie, don’t use that high and mighty tone with me.” His words quavered with anger. “You have a thing or two to learn about judging people. Because I dress well and know about fancy wine doesn’t mean I’m some vulgar Don Juan. What if I judged you by what I saw on the surface? Do you think I’d be here tonight?”

  It was the first time he had ever called her Tessie. It crossed her mind that in his fury he might hit her.

  “No, no, I wasn’t judging, it’s just that . . .”

  He didn’t wait for her to finish her sentence.

  “My wife doesn’t know I’m here,” he said slowly, the anger leveling his sentences. “When I’m home, she doesn’t know I’m there. Fran Antonucci has been sick for twelve years. It’s a horrible disease of the nervous system. She lies in our home, in a special bed. I have round-the-clock nurses. I promised that I’d never put her in a hospital. Now she can’t move, she can’t speak. When I talk to her, she stares blankly. If I squeeze her hand, nothing.” He shook his head. “God, that woman had such life in her.”

  The room became chilly and the candlelight suddenly seemed like a foolish artifice. Tessie got up from her chair and walked to where Barone was sitting. She cradled his large head in her arms. The dead weight of it made it feel as though she was holding a Thanksgiving turkey. “I had no idea,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  Barone got up from the table and walked to the kitchen where he pulled the Sarah Vaughan album Swingin’ Easy from one of his bags. He put it on the hi-fi and set the needle down on the fourth cut. He’d imagined how they would dance and how she would soften in his arms when she heard the words. Now they were sitting inches apart, many worlds between them.

  Looking at the woman seated across from him, he saw his own ache and longing reflected in her face. They sat in their chairs, silently dancing with their private memories as Sarah Vaughan sang.

  BACK BEFORE THEY knew that the tingling in her fingers and the weakness in her legs were a sentence from which there was no reprieve, Barone would make Fran dinner while she lay in bed. This was after he’d sold Peerless and made enough money to move to Miami and make a killing in the real estate boom. A friend had just visited Havana, where he’d seen the game of Jai Alai. It was like super-speed handball, he said. He told Barone how the cestas made the players look like vultures with huge claws, and how they moved with such grace and cunning, leaping in the air and hitting the hard little ball as fast as 180 miles per hour. He wanted Barone to help him open a Jai Alai fronton in Fort Lauderdale. Barone was rich enough to retire, but Fran had discouraged him, saying she’d kill both of them if he spent more time at home. So he went to Havana and saw the Jai Alai and understoo
d the thrill and simplicity of the game as well as how much money there was to be made when overly excited people bet on it. Their first fronton was built on what later became the parking lot of the Hialeah racetrack. Just six years earlier, in 1953, Barone and his friend opened the big fronton in Dania.

  Most nights he’d come home around eleven and fall into bed, but on the nights he was home early, he’d put on the radio, lower the lights, and bring Fran a tray covered with a linen cloth and their best silver. There’d always be a glass of wine and a cut flower—a rose, a carnation. He’d carry in the beautifully arranged setting and she’d say something like, “If your father could see you now, he’d beat the shit out of you.” Anything to undercut the tenderness of the gesture. Years later, when she couldn’t walk and her speech was badly slurred, it was an ordeal for her to leave the bed. On one of those nights, Barone brought her a plate full of roast beef and mashed potatoes, her favorite. When he walked into the room, he saw that her eyes were closed as if she were straining to hear something. The radio had gone static but in between the hissing sounds he could make out the melody: “Someone to Watch Over Me.” When he passed a certain spot in front of the floor lamp, between her bed and the radio, the static dried up and the music became clear. He put down the tray and stood in that spot, a human antenna, until the song played out. Neither of them mentioned the tears that slid down her cheeks.

  “Mother of God, that is a sentimental piece of crap,” she said, when she opened her eyes again. Her words were woozy and unconvincing, and he knew then that the fire had gone out of her.

  THE MUSIC BROUGHT Tessie to the time when Dinah was sixteen months and just starting to walk. They were in downtown Carbondale and Tessie had her by the hand when somehow Dinah slipped away and started to toddle into the street toward an oncoming car. Tessie swooped down to pick her up and fell on her knees. As she went down, she held Dinah up, like a trophy, and, miraculously, she was unhurt. But both of Tessie’s knees were raw and bloody. That night, when Jerry came home, he looked at the Mer-curochrome and Band-Aids and said, “Holy cow, Jo, what did you do, crawl all the way to the supermarket?” She’d considered making up a story about tripping down the basement stairs, but thought if she told this lie, there would be nothing to prevent it from becoming the tail of a kite of lies to follow. So she told him the truth. She remembered the way he tilted his head when he listened hard, and how, when she cried and said, “What kind of a mother am I, to let my child wander into the street like that?” he’d taken her into his arms and said, “You’re the kind of a mother who has a willful child and does the best she can.”

  LOST IN THEIR THOUGHTS, Tessie and Barone sat at the table long after Sarah Vaughan finished singing, and the Beef Stroganoff gravy had congealed into a viscous puddle around the edges of their plates. How sad he looked when his face was in repose. She had never seen his energy depleted.

  “I ran over a cat and killed it,” she said, breaking their silence.

  “You what?”

  “A few months ago, after we first moved here, I was picking up Dinah from the Landys’ and on the way home, I hit a cat. Dinah told me I’d killed it, but I told her no I didn’t, that she was being ridiculous. But I did. I killed it.”

  Barone could have said, “Why are you telling me this?” or “That’s a terrible thing, to run over a cat and kill it,” and though neither of them might ever know why, that would have been the end of that.

  Instead, he put his elbow on the table and cupped his chin in his hand. “I’m sorry. You must have been terrified.” He could picture it, the wild scared look in her eyes. Dinah’s voice high and whiny. Tessie’s impulse not to admit to herself, much less to her daughter, what had actually happened.

  “You bet I was,” she said. “You know, you’re new to town, and everything is strange and you want to do things right. And then you do the most wrong thing you can possibly do, in front of your own daughter no less, and it leaves you feeling . . . I don’t know . . . hopeless I guess.” She twisted her mouth and looked off to the side.

  “There’s no percentage in hopelessness,” he said. “You lose hope and what’ve you got? I mean as human beings, Dottie, it’s the only thing we have that makes us different from animals. Well, we have thumbs, I suppose, but think about it: you moved from Carbondale with a young girl because somewhere inside you thought things could be better. And you came here and you got a job and your daughter is happier and you’ve met me and tonight we ate Beef Stroganoff. Could you ever have imagined any of this would happen? If you only accept life’s bad surprises, and don’t believe that there are good ones of equal weight waiting to happen, well, then I don’t really see what the point of going on is. Do you?”

  “Some people have no choice but to go on,” she said. “If they go on and get the rest of what you said, then that’s gravy.”

  As the words came out of her mouth, they both looked down at the table.

  “No, that’s gravy,” laughed Barone, pointing at the gelatinous mess on his plate.

  “Could I hear that song again, the one about polka dots and pug noses?” asked Tessie.

  Back came Sarah Vaughan, her rich throaty voice singing all about the country dance in a garden. They got up to dance and just as he had planned it, Tessie leaned into him when she heard the words, polka dots and moonbeams. When they walked, their arms around each other, into her bedroom they did not act like two grasping teenagers in the backseat of a Chevy. This time they were tender and slow, two grateful grownups turning to each other for comfort and a respite from pain.

  ELEVEN

  Ella and Charlie hadn’t talked since the day of Eddie Fingers’s funeral. They weren’t avoiding each other exactly, it’s just that they knew when they finally did get together it would be to bring up things neither was ready to discuss.

  For her part, Ella unburdened herself to God. “Please help me understand what I seen with my own eyes,” she prayed. She went to church every morning and tried to make sense of her troubled thoughts. Her oldest friend, Pauline Brown, had been going to the Old Stone Baptist Church with her for nearly twenty years. Since they worked for families only six blocks apart, often they walked back and forth together. On one of those cloudless mornings, when the sun breathed fire and they huddled under the shade of Pauline’s faded red umbrella, Pauline said to her old friend, “What’s wrong with you? You’re not yourself lately.”

  Ella, whose voice always soared like a creaky old bird when they sang the hymns, had lately been singing flat, with none of her usual exuberance. Pauline had noticed that, and how she didn’t stick around after services and chat with the other parishioners. So Ella told her old friend about what had happened that Saturday at the funeral, and then later, at the pool with Mrs. Landy and that young girl in the T-shirt.

  “Do you think Mrs. Landy is one of those women who likes other women?” Ella said.

  “What of it?” asked Pauline. “They said the same thing about Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, and she was the best friend colored folks ever had. They said she looked like a man, and dressed like one too.”

  Ella was not one to judge other people by their looks, she with a nose so flat that it looked as if it were always pressed against a win-dowpane, and the double chin that wrapped around her other one like a crinoline. The two women fell into thought as they moved closer together under the umbrella.

  “What if it’s true that Mrs. Landy turns out to be like that? What will become of Mr. Landy, the Landy children, the house, my room?”

  “Ella,” said Pauline, “your imagination will drive you to distraction. You keep your nose out of what’s not yours to know. Whatever is meant to be, will be.”

  She knew Pauline was right, but she couldn’t stop herself from thinking about all that had happened on that day: Mrs. Lockhart and that man—that nice-looking older man. She saw how Mrs. Lockhart’s nostrils would flair every time he looked at her. Sure as sugar, there was something between them. And what about the girl, Dinah Lockha
rt, seeing her dead friend laid out in his coffin. She nearly up and died with him. Poor child, her father being dead and all.

  Like a swarm of bees, the thoughts kept coming, until Ella felt they would bury her alive. She might have stayed locked inside herself had she not received a letter from her brother Reggie two days later. In the last few years, she and Reggie had lost touch. She knew he was a porter on the Orange Blossom Special, and that he had a wife, Portia, in Hendersonville up in North Carolina. She held the letter in her hand, staring at his jagged handwriting. “He writes like a pecking chicken,” Olie used to say. Reggie only wrote when the news was bad or he wanted something. The last time she heard from him was when he needed money for a new orthopedic shoe. “Now what?” she wondered, slowly pulling the flap from where it was glued to the envelope. She noticed that his handwriting looked shakier than usual. The letter was dated May 28, 1959.

  My dear sister Ella,

  The past years have not been good to me. For reasons that I cannot explain here I lost my position at the railroad. Portia and I scraped by on barely nothing and now she don’t want me in the house no more. You are all I can turn to and I don’t want to be a burden but I would like to come and stay with you in Florida. I will be arriving in Tallahassee on Saturday June 19.

  Your loving brother Reggie.

  As if she didn’t have enough on her mind.

  The Landys knew about Reggie and spoke kindly about him, the way you would about any infirm person. But frankly, Ella couldn’t imagine how Reggie, with his missing teeth and dragging his too-short leg behind him as though he were tethered to a ball and chain, and Mrs. Landy, who was repulsed by anything that wasn’t physically attractive, could exist under one roof.

  Later that afternoon, she caught sight of Charlie as he was pumping soda from the fountain off the living room. “How you been?” she asked, squinting at one of the glasses on the shelf to see if it needed washing.