Mrs. Davidow’s preparations consisted mainly of getting in a new case of Bombay gin and one of Wild Turkey. Over the past three days, she consumed a lot of this as she discussed the route they would take and where they could stay over, while my mother fried chicken or made Angel Pie or slapped Paul away from her coconut cake. She had made the icing for this cake with real coconut, instead of Baker’s canned, giving Walter the job of shaving and shredding the two coconuts that she still had. She had been quite surprised that Lola had found coconuts in La Porte, and so was I. My mother was also surprised that the third coconut had disappeared.
Lola Davidow would follow my mother around the kitchen with a martini in one hand and a map in the other, plotting their course through Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. She meant to do nearly all the driving, which I was sure the state police would like to hear in Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas.
I knew the route as well as they did. On my own map, bought at the stationery store in town, I had marked each place Lola had said they would stop at night, the first town being Culpepper, Virginia. I wanted to feel I had some control over the trip, especially over when they hit the Tamiami Trail. I’d marked it in red.
The day before they left, Ree-Jane had found me in my favorite spot on the porch where she modeled her evening gown. She said, “This is what I’m wearing to dances.” She twirled, actually twirled, floating the light blue silk and chif fon in waves around her legs.
“Do they have them in Culpepper?” I refused to look up from my Key West sunset photo.
“Oh, for God’s sake, no. In Miami Beach.”
Then she started doing a dance step and singing, “Palm trees ... are gently swaying ... They seem to hear me saying ...” She swayed along, holding out the thin, tissue-y blue of her skirt, going back and forth, back and forth. As she was close to the top step of the porch, I was hoping she’d go over, but she didn’t.
Ree-Jane never could carry a tune, but it made me remember her phonograph. “Would it be okay if I listened to your records while you’re gone?”
Freed from the thrall of her invisible dancing partner and back on planet earth again, she asked (suspiciously), “Why?”
“Because I like your records. They’re nice and old. Old songs are comforting.” I don’t know where that notion came from. Except maybe it was true. My mother liked to sing “Red Sails in the Sunset” sometimes, and I found that comforting.
She balanced herself and her long full skirt up on the porch railing, thinking it over. Then grudgingly she said, “Well. Seeing you have to stay here, well, I guess so. Only, don’t touch one single thing in my room!”
“Uh,” I grunted, meaning nothing.
“You can sit in my room and listen, but nothing else.”
To think I’d pay attention to that warning only showed her ignorance. Anyway, why would I want to mess with her stuff? I’d sooner go through Walter’s belongings, which would be more interesting, I’m sure. Anyway, anything Ree-Jane owned that she thought would make me jealous she’d already shown me, so there wouldn’t be much point in rummaging through her drawers. I had, of course, no intention of sitting in her room and listening. The phonograph was to go down with me to the Pink Elephant. I needed atmosphere.
While she posed there on the porch rail, I asked, “Are you going to model for Great-aunt Aurora?”
“What? Not after the last time I was up there. That crazy old bitch!”
The “last time,” was, of course, the chicken-wing incident. But Ree-Jane clearly had forgotten she’d never admitted what had happened and had, instead, come back to the kitchen and said Aurora had complimented her on her beautiful self.
Then she added, with a slippery smile, “But I guess it figures, since she’s a Paradise.” Meaning all my back family was crazy.
Innocently, I asked, “Why? What did she do?” Ree-Jane wasn’t about to tell me Aurora’d thrown a chicken wing at her and called her a “blond floozy.”
“She’s just crazy, that’s all.”
“Oh. Well, that’s too bad. I mean she especially wants to see your Florida clothes.”
Ree-Jane stopped pleating the chiffon of her skirt. “I don’t believe it!”
Neither did I. “She does, though. She likes clothes, if you’ve noticed. And she’s got those two steamer trunks. She still hangs her clothes in them. So she really likes travel, too.”
Now, the trouble with vanity is you always want to believe something or someone so much that you’ll believe it no matter how much it’s against good sense or reason. But at this point, there was nobody left to model for. There were Will and Mill, but even Ree-Jane knew better than to try and get in the Big Garage. That place was like a fort. I was probably the only Zulu who dared even to knock on the door.
“Too bad,” I said, sighing (as though I cared), “for she likes Heather Gay Struthers clothes a lot. She’d especially like to see this blue evening gown. Her favorite song is ‘Alice Blue Gown.’ ” That was the only truth I’d told. Of course, Aurora only sings it when she’s stinking drunk, but she still is really fond of it. “Listen: I’m taking her up her lunch in a little. Why don’t you come with me?”
As I said, only a fool would have believed this, but of course, we’re talking about Ree-Jane, who finally said, “Well, all right. When?”
“I’m going right now to get it and I’ll bring the tray back through. So you can just wait.”
My mother was dishing out creamed chicken over biscuits for two of Anna Paugh’s customers and I said I could take up Aurora’s lunch. “She wants a stuffed tomato.”
My mother frowned so that her forehead took on the look of bean rows ready for planting. She pointed out that Aurora disliked stuffed tomatoes. “They’re stuffed with tuna-fish salad, and she hates tuna fish as much as the tomatoes.”
I was leaning against the countertop with my shoulders bunched, the heels of my hands pressing down as my feet did a little jig. “She changed her mind.”
My mother just looked at me, almost as suspiciously as Ree-Jane had, but when I didn’t look away, she set about getting the tomatoes from the ice box and arranging one on a little bed of salad. Then she added hot rolls and a small dish of peas. I transferred this to a tray and hotfooted it back to the front of the hotel, where Ree-Jane was waiting, flicking through one of her fashion magazines. Her blue evening gown was really very pretty. The hem was cut in a kind of zigzag, and fell over a silk underskirt. It was a beautiful shade of blue, a shade I imagined the ocean to look like, sweeping up on the Florida sands.
The last time she’d seen this tomato-stuffed-with-tuna-salad dish, Aurora had poked it around on the plate and said the Hotel Paradise was going to hell in a handbasket, serving these tomatoes. Why, if she, Aurora Paradise, were down there overseeing things, she’d have fried chicken and Angel Pie every night.
Anyway, the nice thing about the stuffed tomato was it fit your hand as good as a tennis ball. So up the stairs we went, Ree-Jane behind me, to the fourth floor.
The minute I walked into her room with the tray (I’d told Ree-Jane to wait outside) Aurora asked, “Where’s my Cold Comfort?” She seemed to think I had twenty-four-hour access to the bar in the back office. The fact I’d brought Ree-Jane instead of her cocktail would not sit well at all.
“You hear, Miss? I want my Cold Comfort!”
“I’m sorry. I couldn’t find the Southern Comfort.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Lola Davidow wears a bottle on a chain around her neck. What’s this?” She was wearing her gray net gloves, with the fingers cut out, and she poked at the tomato. “That’s one of Jen Graham’s goddamned stuffed tomatoes!” She waggled a mittened finger at me. “You know I can’t stand these. I’m onto you, Missy!”
Aurora was a lot smarter than Ree-Jane (as Ree-Jane was about to see). I kind of fluted, “Somebody’s come to seeee youuu.” Aurora wanted visitors about as much as Will and Mill did. “Come on in, Jaaaane.”
Here cam
e Ree-Jane, waltzing through the door, her blue chiffon skirt held in thumb and finger, spread out like a fan. She hummed and pirouetted all around Aurora’s chair—eyes closed, arms waving, as she’d done on the porch. It couldn’t have been better (or worse, depending on your point of view).
Aurora followed these movements, gap-mouthed, speechless—but not for long. “You blond-headed bimbo!”
Ree-Jane’s eyes snapped open and she quickly rose from a Cinderella curtsy she’d made, looking completely white.
“Floozy!” Aurora’s mittened hand curled around the tomato, lifting it from the plate in that slow-motion way of awful things about to happen.
It was then my heart, which twenty-three hours out of the twenty-four yearned for Ree-Jane’s ruination, turned tail on me and fled. Ree-Jane backed away, her hands in her blond hair like the heroine on the cover of a cheap detective novel. I grabbed Aurora’s hand just as it was rearing back to let the tomato fly. It dropped from her hand, and the tuna salad plopped onto the tray as she yelled at Ree-Jane to get the hell out.
And I, really disgusted with myself, said something soppy to Ree-Jane, who had, of course, run out of the room, her face such a mottled pink above the sea-blue gown, it could have been the sun going down into the technicolor waters off Key West. Why had I stopped Aurora after all of my plotting and planning? I guess I’d felt sorry for Ree-Jane, or maybe for Ree-Jane’s dress. I did not like confusing feelings or going back on myself. It could get to the point where I’d think She’s only a poor old lady the next time Miss Bertha dumped her basket of rolls on the floor.
To shut up Aurora (who was heaving insults right and left at the Davidows) I told her I’d go down and make her a drink. On the way down the stairs—Ree-Jane had fairly flown down them and slammed the door to her room—I wondered why I felt that little drop of pity for her. I decided it wasn’t all that much of a change of heart; I figured if the blue dress had wound up covered in tuna fish, there’d be hell to pay. And I knew who would pay it. My mother was no fool.
So I continued on my way to the kitchen to make the Cold Comfort with a cold conscience.
Will and Mill joined Walter and Vera and me to see the three travelers off. Will and Mill carted all of the luggage downstairs and out to the station wagon, but it was obvious none of this registered on them. Their minds were back in the Big Garage no matter where their feet were. This was especially true of Will, who Moses himself would have sworn was up on the mountain with him when Will wasn’t even in the same country. I’ve never known anyone who could look you right in the eye and nod and not be hearing a single word. Mill wasn’t much better. His fingers moved up and down his pants leg, so you could tell he was playing the piano in his mind.
But they both called good-bye, and have a nice time, as if they meant it, and waved until the car was down at the end of the drive. Then they turned and hotfooted it back to the Big Garage.
20
Sauerkraut
Roast veal and Salisbury steak were the entrees for dinner; before she left I’d heard my mother giving very specific instructions to Mrs. Eikleburger as to how the roast should be cooked. My mother’s main fret in life is leaving the cooking to somebody else. I wonder if she isn’t like Will—even though she’ll be driving the Tamiami Trail, she’ll still be back in the kitchen, overseeing the roast.
Miss Bertha knew that my mother was to go to Florida and she hadn’t liked hearing that at breakfast, not one bit. The “other two” (meaning, of course, Ree-Jane and her mother) could “drive their car off Table Rock into a flaming pit” as far as she was concerned. This was one of the very few times I found myself in accord with Miss Bertha’s feelings. But the absence of “Jen,” well, that was a catastrophe. For who was this “Eikleburger” person? Miss Bertha was really hot under the collar and it took Mrs. Fulbright some convincing to get her to believe that she wouldn’t be eating German food for several days. After she’d simmered down, I took the opportunity to un-convince her by saying that it wasn’t only German cooking Mrs. Eikleburger did, for she sometimes cooked American dishes. But not often. Mrs. Fulbright winced, but still smiled at me.
“I’m of German extraction, myself,” said Mrs. Fulbright. Mrs. Fulbright would have turned herself into an Eskimo if it would have helped me, she was that sweet.
So that afternoon when I’d finished putting up my pictures in the Pink Elephant, I got Walter to help me look through the cookbooks up on a shelf above the pastry table. He looked in Foods of the World and I looked in International Cooking. Walter was slow because he stopped so long to stare at the pictures. He said, “Here it says weiners, but it don’t look like them. But it’s from Germany, it says.”
I looked over his shoulder. It was Wiener schnitzel and it was veal. I congratulated Walter on finding the very thing. We kept going to see if we could find German Salisbury steak, but the closest we could get was sauerbraten, which made my mouth pucker up to read about all the vinegar in the recipe. But sauerbraten was a piece of beef; it didn’t look like hamburger. I scratched my elbows and considered this. The beef was covered with a lovely dark gravy, and Walter could probably make that from one of the ready-made packets. I could have, but I had entirely too much to do as it was.
I went to the stove to see what was bubbling away under the top. Sauerkraut! Probably that was to be one of the vegetables, and Mrs. Eikleburger, being, I now supposed, “of German extraction,” would be cooking something like that. Now, my mother cooks sauerkraut like nobody else in the world. My mother can make sauerkraut haters (which most of us are) into sauerkraut lovers—nothing less than a cooking miracle, but that’s my mother’s cooking for you. Many people have tried to get that recipe out of her, but, again, I’m one of the few who know it. What she does is to wash and squeeze out canned sauerkraut, then spreads it on paper towels to absorb the moisture, then does the same thing all over, twice. Af ter that she cooks it with white wine, and, I think, juniper berries.
Mrs. Eikleburger’s sauerkraut was just cooking in water, the old sauerkraut everyone hates. Good. I went off to type the menus. I wanted to catch the afternoon train to Cold Flat Junction. I wanted to find Louise Landis.
21
Diner people
There are some words that can set up in me a kind of home-sickness for a thing other than home. The feeling is such a close kin to fear, it could convince you that fear is what it is. The Florida words seem to have done this and made me homesick for a place I’ve never been and probably never will be.
I am easily haunted. If any spirit wanted to, it could take me over without any trouble at all, slipping in through the invisible cracks in my skin. We all have cracks but don’t know it; we are all pretty windy.
Places, words ... A space to fill a lack.
Cold Flat Junction is like that. It has something to do with the silence and the distances. The distances are all around me—north south east west. Wherever I look is endless; nothing stops my looking. Something should; you’d expect something to stop it, a wall or a mountain, but Cold Flat Junction land just seems to go on forever. There are houses, of course, though even these are kind of spread out. There are a few businesses, like the Esso station and Rudy’s Bar and the Windy Run Diner. There are these, but it’s the stretches beyond these that I’m talking about. From the railroad station, I look across the tracks and the land beyond and those dark blue trees that are its horizon and this homesick feeling comes over me.
Cold Flat Junction seldom sees passengers either coming or going. The reason the train makes the stop at all is because of the old railroad station, which I think is called by some “an architectural gem.” I guess it is Victorian.
“The Junction,” as people who live around here sometimes refer to it, was originally expected to be a bustling, busy place, with the two roads intersecting there—a junction through which much traffic was expected to move, but none ever did. I had been here three times, twice aboard the train, once with Mr. Root and the Wood boys. The train compartme
nt was pleasantly stuffy, with worn, burgundy-colored and once flowered horsehair seats. When the conductor came, I handed him the ticket that I’d bought last time. It had never been collected and I expected him to refuse it, but he didn’t.
I was the only person to step down to the Cold Flat Junction platform; I stood and looked at the imposing red brick station, which belonged in a much bigger, more interesting town. As always, it looked closed but wasn’t, although the blind was once again pulled down over the ticket window. I waited for the train to pull out, and when it had gone, I looked out again over that cropped, empty land on the other side that stretched away to that far-off line of dark woods. Then I set my feet in the direction of the diner, which stood across from the Esso station and which was the place I always stopped for information, and of course, food.
Its interior was by now familiar to me; I could see it perfectly in my thoughts when I was somewhere else. The counter, where I always sat, was a kind of half-horseshoe design with four seats going around the end curve. There were tables with chrome legs and different-colored Formica tops; a few booths were installed in the comer nearest the door. The booths were dark red Naugahyde, and one torn seat back was bandaged with silver duct tape. It all gave the impression of being furnished with leftovers, not enough of any one thing to fit the place out correctly. Skimpy flowered curtains too short to reach the sill hung at the small windows. I took my usual seat at the curved end of the counter and pulled out a menu. It was the same.
So were the customers. I recognized all of them, including the married couple in a booth. There was Billy, the one who looked like a truck driver but probably wasn’t, as he spent so much time in Cold Flat Junction, at least in the diner. Down the counter were the two whiskered men wearing the same blue caps that looked like those old railroad caps you see in pictures. One was named Don Joe; I think the other was named Evren. There was a heavy-set, chain-smoking woman in thick glasses who sat at the counter. And of course, the one waitress, “Louise Snell, Prop.” (This was on the badge she wore on her uniform.)
Cold Flat Junction Page 13