That last song’s about the Great Flood, so when Hurricane Hugo destroyed a whole lot of Charleston four months later, I remembered that moment. The winds came toward the barrier islands at 135 miles per hour. Lots of houses in my old neighborhood were torn apart. They couldn’t save anything at the Wards’ house. Moochie McKee’s roof got blown down the street intact and blocked the road for a month. Dogs drowned in the flooding. A whole restaurant on Folly Beach, a few blocks away from Gizzy’s, the place Euge’s family ran, got washed into the ocean.
Mama said that Daddy refused to let anybody evacuate him. He said he would rather go down with the ship, but she pushed him out of the house, both of them screaming in the wind and rain. They got on the evacuation bus and stayed in a school near Columbia for a couple of nights. Then they moved in with Vietta for a while, coming back to clean the house and repair some of the damage. Annie and I helped them on weekends when we could. We never did get it all fixed. The roof still leaks in some places.
When the music was turned off and most of the guests had left, Vietta started the cleanup phase. She approached me as she crossed the lawn, collecting used plastic cups. She had a glow in her eye as bright as the string of colored lights zigzagging across the field. The breeze kept lifting strands of her amber wig into the air. “Don’t you and Annie want to get on home?” she said, pursing her lips. “I can hold down the fort.” She repeated Great Uncle Linton’s joke—he’d repeated it about two hundred times, to my embarrassment, but nowhere near Annie. My new wife froze when she heard it. I scooped her shoulders and led her off to our crazily decorated car. “Did she say what I think she said?” Annie asked.
I pretended I hadn’t heard the question. The car sat under a live oak that blocked out the streetlight. In the dark, Annie moved my hand to her bosom, chuckled, and said, “Well, now that we’re married, you can.”
Annie went into the bathroom at our motel to slip out of her bridal gown, brush her teeth, and put her hair up. By the time she got out, I had fallen asleep in front of the television, still in my peach tux. She poked me but I didn’t stir, so she let me sleep.
The next morning I half-figured that Annie would bring up the fact that we hadn’t done anything sexual since that night in the kitchen. But we had to leave pretty early, so she was already getting set by the time I stuck my feet into my slippers. I reckoned she thought of it as the man’s job to initiate sex, and she’d had that bad experience with kent and everything.
With the no-sex thing hanging in the air between us all day, we drove to Disney World in the malibu and stayed at the All-Star sports Resort. The hotel didn’t cost much, and I guess it was sort of cheesy, with a collage of team pennants and famous athletes decorating the wallpaper and matching sheets. But we had already talked about how the low price would let us spend more money in the park. The hospital bill hadn’t come due, so that fooled me into thinking that I still had some money.
At the park Annie and I went a little berserk, even for us. In the morning we made our way from Main Street backward to Tomorrowland, where we stopped and had rare and juicy deluxe hamburgers for lunch. We got crispy wave-cut fries with the burgers and sipped bucket-size grape Cokes through fat straws to wash it all down.
Then we headed across the hive of automobiles to Epcot, hand in hand. I am married, I thought to myself periodically. I am a married man. I’m just a normal, married man. I’m gonna be a daddy. I love my wife. We are good people. On top of our own kids, we’re going to adopt orphans from foreign countries and disabled children nobody wants. People magazine will photograph us for having such a big, loving family.
We finished the day at the Ohana restaurant in the Polynesian Resort area. By the time we got back to our room at the All-Star, I had no energy left. My feet had swollen up and throbbed from all the walking. I had a blister on the side of my foot where my new sneakers—we’d gotten matching pairs as a wedding present—had rubbed against it. I took off my sock and poked at the tender bubble. Annie flopped down on the bed and let out a long sigh. She mussed up her hair and raised her head from a lying position, then peeped at me through the wavy strands.
“How are you feeling?” she asked. “You’re not tired, are you?”
“I sort of am,” I told her, not looking up from my injury.
Annie pushed the hair from in front of her face with both index fingers, like a curtain opening on a stage. She pursed her red lips; she must have freshened her lipstick when we got home. I found a paper clip and walked over to the desk, then lifted a pack of matches out of the ashtray. I unbent the first turn of the paper clip and set it down. Annie didn’t take her eyes off me. I returned to the armchair, which had basketball players on the fabric, and massaged my instep, searching for the right place to puncture the blister.
“I’m bored,” she announced.
“Wouldn’t you love a peanut butter fudge sundae right now?” I asked. “With M&M’s and crushed walnuts on top?”
“Sort of, I guess.”
I felt that I had to make love to Annie that night, even though she was three and a half months pregnant. She wanted me to, and I didn’t like disappointing her. I had known all along this moment would have to come, of course, but I hadn’t planned for it. I’d only thought that I probably could do it again. At this point, even after the failed exorcism, I still wouldn’t put a name on what I was, because putting the name would only make things sure and I couldn’t come back from that. I meant to fight it.
I got up from my chair and spoke with all the masculine gumption I could bring up. “Let’s go eat now.” Reluctantly, she followed me out. We had chicken fingers and a couple of large Cokes with no ice, and shared a banana fudge sundae with piles of nuts and whipped cream on top, Nilla wafers stuck in around the sides like a fence, and M&M’s whose colors rubbed off on the white fluff. All drenched in butterscotch sauce.
We got back to our suite around 11:30—bedtime. On top of the exhaustion, my feet hurt pretty bad, since all the walking had chafed my blister. My stomach bulged and churned with half-digested slop to the point where I was fixing to spit up.
I brushed my teeth, washed my face, and slid into my pajamas without leaving the locked bathroom. Annie and I prayed together, asking the Lord to look down and bless our marriage. Silently I added my usual wish to be changed.
I got under the covers. With the lights out and a heavenly glow from the neon display outside coming through the drawn curtains, Annie climbed into bed beside me and asked for a goodnight kiss. I rolled over and puckered up. As we kissed, she kept her lips pressed against mine, then opened her mouth and tried to wedge her tongue between my lips.
“What’re you doing?” I struggled to say against her tongue.
“It’s our honeymoon, Gary!”
I didn’t respond. Instead I listened to her breathing, hoping we could let this drop and go to sleep. No way could I have a marriage where sex had to be important.
“Gary,” she said carefully, “I would like to express my devotion to you in Christ through the act of love.”
“Is that what you told Kent?” I asked, not realizing how bad it sounded.
“If it bothered you that I wasn’t pure, you should never have married me,” Annie said. “You knew that going in. You even made it worse! but it wasn’t my fault—any of this—and it isn’t fair for you to blame me!” Tears came up in her voice, but she held them in.
Saying stuff like that, I started to feel like somebody who wasn’t me, who backhanded his wife and called her a whore to keep her from getting to know his inner thoughts. I hoped it was over and we could go to sleep. I felt like a guard dog in a scrap yard, pacing around and snapping at anybody who got ideas about nosing in on my territory. So I didn’t apologize until the next morning. Instead, I tugged some of the covers back from my new wife and went to sleep, a little uncomfortably, almost like a normal man.
Until a little while after Cheryl was born, in late October, Annie kept her one-bedroom in Longwood, on the seco
nd floor of a complex called tudor Valley. She thought it looked like Smurfland. Every time we went to her home, she would sing the Smurf song and pretend to be Smurfette. The place was kind of small but it had two bedrooms and it was closer to my work. I loved sleeping there with my wife. It felt very comforting to join a community of millions of married people who did the same thing night after night.
Though I enjoyed my time there, I couldn’t perform my marital duties. Her pregnancy lowered her sex drive, but sometimes Annie hinted that we could still make love. I would ignore her, leaping to describe how difficult my workday had been or spending a long time complaining about a petty dispute I’d had with a coworker. I made a mental list of Bible quotes that laid out strict rules about sex, just in case.
If Annie pressed up against me in a way I found too sexy as we sat on the couch with a family movie or a romantic comedy, I would embrace her tenderly, snuggle, and kiss her, usually with my mouth closed. I’d remind her that having relations might not go well for a pregnant woman. When her hand traveled up my leg, too close to the softness in my lap, I’d bring up Romans 8:7—“The carnal mind is enmity against God”—and her hand would fly back to her side. I didn’t get aroused, as much as I tried to fool myself into thinking I felt something I didn’t. Only a tiny tingle of delight shimmered in my pelvis when her warm body pressed against me, like hugging my mama. Even that small feeling, though, sometimes meant more to me than the animalistic frenzy people called normal sexuality.
Annie never complained about the lack of sex, but I saw her frustration rising like a flood tide. She knew that the Bible required her to submit to her husband, but she wasn’t afraid to express herself, either. “What happened to ‘Go forth and multiply’?” I heard her sigh to herself once, as she changed into her nightgown. She had just left me on the couch as the second volume of Dances with Wolves played out on the VCR.
One Saturday at the supermarket, a family of five passed by us. The three children pushed the buggy by themselves as the adults shopped up ahead. A boy of about six pulled the buggy. His younger brother sat in it, opening a box of crispy snacks, and an infant girl dangled her legs from the toddler seat, sucking on a pacifier. Annie and I saw her happy, wise expression at the same time. We kootchy-kooed her fat cheeks and talked baby talk to her until the mother took control of the cart. She had messy white hair and a big head like an owl. She looked us up and down, so we moved to a different aisle.
“Do you really want this kid?” Annie asked, rubbing her stretched-out belly. Coincidentally, we had moved into the diaper section.
“Of course I do,” I told her, though I sped up our buggy a little to avoid the images of babies on all the products around us. I pictured them flying off the packages like cherubs and dancing in the air around our heads. “The kingdom of God belongs to children.”
“So you want more than one?”
“I sure do.”
We got to the end of the aisle and Annie checked the traffic on either side. Without turning back to me, she said, “Well, I only know one way to make a baby!” An unusual undertone of anger pinched her voice. I waited to say anything.
“Look, there’s a sale on peas,” I remarked as we passed a pyramid of cans.
Annie’s outburst at the supermarket made it clear that a time was coming when I would have to see whether I could perform with a woman. But it wouldn’t be fair for me to use her as the guinea pig, especially if I couldn’t hack it and we had to get unhitched. Unfortunately, I had painted myself into a tight corner on this one.
* * *
On October 22, 1989, the Lord blessed Annie and me with a healthy child. We named her Cheryl, after a friend of Annie’s, but we kept her conception date a secret and told everybody she was a preemie, betting they wouldn’t square that with her fit little body. Cheryl was plump like us and exotic, with curly dark hair, almond eyes, and a wide smile. It shouldn’t have surprised me, but she really looked like a perfect blend of me and her mother. Watching Cheryl, I enjoyed seeing how a new person could have a full personality. Cheryl never slept more than three hours at a time and always woke up howling something fierce. I worried that she might grow up to be a rock-and-roll singer. She liked peach baby food, but Mama couldn’t even get creamed spinach in her mouth; she clamped right up. She had a sweet tooth, just like her daddy.
For the first few weeks, I took care of Annie. Gradually, as she gained strength, raising Cheryl became mostly her job. When I changed diapers, they always came loose, and if Cheryl cried and I rocked her or bounced her on my leg, she screamed more—like a banshee. I was half-afraid she hated me already. The pressure to keep Cheryl safe scared the bejeezus out of me, and all the drooling, the poop, and the pee turned my stomach, as cute as we tried to make it sound. The messed-up sleep schedule soon made me a completely exhausted wreck.
Whenever I lay my baby’s trembling, vein-covered head in my palm, I worried that I’d accidentally let go or twist her limbs into a painful position. I guess that came from my father always calling me incompetent. On a beach trip once, Annie passed her to me as we stood on a jetty, and as I tried to balance her body with my arms, I fumbled in a real dangerous way and almost dropped her. Annie gasped. If I hadn’t grabbed Cheryl by the ankle and under the thigh at the last second, she’d have knocked her head against a rock and been brain damaged or dead with her brains everywhere. It would have been my fault.
After that episode, Annie demanded that I give Cheryl to her, both right then and in a kind of permanent way. An awful tide of bad-father guilt rose up to my neck and made me shiver. My inside voices laughed, saying, This is already a mess, and now you’re gonna mess up the mess, too.
* * *
In my downtime at work, I fretted about my troubles. I didn’t see any way out. I regretted that I hadn’t let anything develop between Joy and me. How had I missed her signals? Could she have saved me? I would ask myself these questions over and over, tugging a paper cone from the dispenser by the water cooler and filling it with cold liquid.
The Daytona Reports office, where I still had a part-time job, stood on the second floor of a strip mall just at the edge of the part of town considered nice. A hairdresser, a tattoo parlor, and a live-music bar were its closest neighbors downstairs. Sometimes, during the night shift, we had to contend with loud sounds and unruly behavior. A colorful segment of the population, a lot like the folks from my neighborhood, gathered there in the dim alley that led to our upstairs office. If I thought about it at all, I pictured myself in the Christ-like situation of working among those who most needed salvation. One of these days I could lend a hand to a wayward soul.
Every so often at work, they’d cut a survey short for some reason— especially market research polls. On a late shift one Friday night, the higher-ups told the boss that the night’s deep-freezer questionnaire had been pulled. Ahead of us we had either an hour of twiddling our thumbs or an early departure. To our surprise, the boss let us go.
Careful not to act too eager, I sharpened my pencils and put them back in their yellow plastic box. I poked my time card into the slot and it made a pleasant clunk sound. Then I swung the door open into the sweet humidity of a real Florida night. Something about going from the chilly air-conditioned world of the office into the outside stirred me. When I stepped into the humid breeze and cricket noise, I had a vision of another glass door, one inside me. One that opened into real air and freedom. An hour of my own time—time I wouldn’t have to account for when I got home.
Before I stepped into the alley, I hadn’t thought of spending that time anywhere other than at Annie’s. I dug down in my pocket for my key-ring, deciding to surprise her with a treat—doughnut holes, maybe, or a bucket of pistachio ice cream—to make up for what I couldn’t figure out how to provide.
When I got to the bottom of the steps, I heard muffled rock-and-roll drums coming from inside the bar. To my left, leaning against the wall, I saw a lady in a pink Tweety Bird T-shirt and spandex leggings counting a
small roll of bills. On the ground, closer to the stairwell, sat a scratched-up car seat with a child in it. The kid was adorable, and he had on a faded blue jumpsuit. My attention went directly to the baby, who was sucking on a pacifier the color of beer. I waved at him and his eyes opened wide. The kid seemed more awake than the woman, who focused on her counting and said, “For-ty-sev-en!” in a happy voice when she got done. She folded the bills tightly, wrapped them with a rubber band, and zipped them into her fanny pack.
Continuing to wave and smile and say “Hi! Hi! Hello!” to the infant, I moved on to other baby talk. I had plenty of practice now, and this child had a magnetism about him—alert, shiny eyes and velvety skin. For an instant I couldn’t help imagining him as the fine-looking man he would someday become, but I tried not to let that fantasy run away with itself. I squatted and dangled my car keys above the boy’s hand, hardly realizing that his mama’s eyes had traveled from my shoes to my head and back again.
“Oh, hello, sir,” she said. She had a nice, sugary voice. I looked up, a little embarrassed at how much attention I’d paid to her child and not her. Mortified, I thought she could tell I had attractions for men because I liked playing with her male child. I shouldn’t have worried.
This lady had dyed her hair blond as straw and stretched it back into a ponytail. It stood out against her cardboard-brown forehead. She stretched her neck and said, “I hope you don’t mind my asking, but are you going in the direction of Pinecrest Avenue? I’m supposed to be staying with my sister. She doesn’t drive and her husband’s out of town and she’s over there waiting, but my ride didn’t show up.” She indicated the car seat. “And it’s just too heavy carrying this one around.” Her casual laughter put me at ease.
“Sure, you can ride with me,” I said, though I hadn’t heard of Pinecrest Avenue. The boy batted my keys and bounced slightly. “What’s his name?”
“Dyson. I’m Penny.” we shook hands and I introduced myself. “Ordinarily,” she continued, “I wouldn’t ask a stranger, but I can trust you. I could read a face real well.”
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