by Liza Nelson
“Oh?” That was interesting. Surprising as well. And a little worrisome. Dylan told me that Cass was popular, but she never mentioned fickle. If Cass dropped her, Dylan would be heartbroken. I pulled a pack of gum out of my breast pocket.
“When I can’t smoke, I’ve gotta chew.” I held out a stick of Wrigley’s Spearmint which Louise declined. Gum chewing is not allowed at Gulfside.
“Dylan seems like such a nice girl. You must be proud of her,” Louise said. She paused, then added, “I’m not just being polite. She really does seem a quiet, sensible, well-brought-up girl.”
The irony was unavoidable. I knew, and Louise had to know, too, that anyone you asked in Esmeralda would assume it should be the other way around. Louise’s daughter should be the one people describe as well brought-up, not mine. But Cass is evidently something of a tough nut. Not that I’ve ever said more than two words to the girl, but the way she dresses and makes herself up like Miss Punk Rock of 1986 has to drive a conventional woman like Louise crazy.
“Cassie is going through such a stage. I hope she is not a bad influence.”
“I’m not worried. Dylan’s not that easily influenced. Besides a girl like Cass, I like her spirit. Dylan is crazy about her.” And if she hurts Dylan’s feelings I’ll kill her.
“Darryl complains about the hair, the makeup, the jewelry. He says she is not wearing those crosses of hers out of religious conviction. Of course she isn’t, but it can be hard to know anymore when to keep the parental reins tight and when to let go.”
“Tell me about it,” I agreed, not that I really had that problem with Dylan. I’ve raised her in Esmeralda knowing she’d have to learn early how to stand on her own because there was no way she and I would just blend in, and she has learned. I like her black T-shirts better than Peter Pan collars or polyester stretch pants, that’s for sure. Dylan might be a little self-conscious, what teenager isn’t? But she is a great kid, the kid every mother wants. She’s her own person, but she knows how to get along with all kinds of people. I must say I’ve done a good job of child-rearing. Her classmates’ parents have to give me that, whatever else they think of me. God knows what they do think, and only God cares. Of course, at the moment, I’m a hero because of the bicycle accident, but I imagine Esmeralda’s usual thinking about Ms. Godiva Blue lies more along the lines of crackpot eccentric Yankee, also mannish and possibly atheist or Jew. Some of which may or may not be true; I’m certainly not telling.
It doesn’t help that I’m better educated than most of the teachers whose rooms I clean. I can see their little brains calculating, wondering why, if I’m so smart, do I keep this shitty job? Their attitude is a lot like my mother’s, come to think of it. Why are people so uptight, so ready to judge and ready to blame? Of course, my artistic nature sets them off, too. My boxes on display at The Pink Heron, some of them are worth hundreds of dollars, but people around here don’t know what to make of them. Esmeraldans think art means landscapes and the occasional still life, if they think about art at all.
“I find those boxes of yours fascinating,” Louise Culpepper said out of nowhere. Was she reading my mind or what?
“Yeah, be honest now.”
“I do, even if they are a tad unsettling.”
“A tad?” We both laughed.
“Well, you’re a tad unsettling in general.”
“I probably am.” We laughed again. Let’s face it, a six-foot-tall redhead is going to stand out wherever she goes—I’m used to it— and in Esmeralda, where women my age still wear flower-print dresses and go to the beauty parlor, I am a regular freak. Me and the Pink Duchess.
“Dylan and Cass, they’re a hoot, aren’t they?” I thought shifting the subject back to our daughters might be wise.
Louise nodded. “I hope, I truly do, that Dylan is the friend Cass has been looking for. She needs a close girlfriend like Dylan. I don’t have a clue what goes on in my daughter’s brain. I truly think I could live with everything if I didn’t feel so in the dark about Cass all the time.” Her hint of desperation felt foreign and a little pathetic. After all, I know Dylan as well as I know myself.
As I struggled to strike the right note of proper empathetic commiseration, I noticed Philip Rainey moping along the edge of the field as if he’d lost something in the weeds. I’d seen and talked to him at school half a dozen times since the accident, but I don’t think I’d realized before how small Philip was, dark and small with chicken-skinny arms and legs. I looked for but could not see the father in the son. It occurred to me then that, as special as Philip seemed to me, in his schoolyard life he was the kind of almost invisible little boy usually passed over by teachers as well as classmates.
“Hey, Philip, aren’t you going to come by and say hi?”
“He’s in my room,” Louise said as Philip slowly walked over.
“No kidding. Another child we have in common.” I jumped up from the step and bounded down to meet Philip halfway across the field. I swooped him into a hug, trying not to remember my conversation with his father the night before, a conversation I’d already decided was best forgotten. Out of the blue, Joe had begun a story.
“A year ago we went to Tallahassee to have a family photograph made for Christmas, the cards they make you up,” he told me. “Only something went wrong at Sears, the man in charge of developing negatives went berserk, destroyed a whole day’s worth of families. Not just ours. By the time the money came back with the form apology it was too late to make another appointment. For months I wondered if I should drive back down there. Raise hell. I never did. The beginning of the end.”
“Why are you telling me this?” I’d asked, but Joe didn’t answer. Now here was his son swinging on my arms.
“So why did the lobster blush?” I asked Philip.
He shook his head, his eyes on the sandy plot of grass in front of us.
I leaned down and whispered, “Because the sea weed.”
He looked up straight at me then, shocked that I’d tell what I guess is a dirty joke to a seven-year-old. Which was the point, because despite himself his cheeks puffed and all his missing teeth showed as he broke into giggles. Little-boy giggles are hard to beat. All of a sudden he was laughing like crazy, and I had two more jokes up my sleeve. When I gave him a push toward a group playing Star Wars near the teeter-totters, he actually let himself be pulled into the play.
“You’re great with kids,” Louise said when I came back to the step.
“Well, Philip and I have a kind of pact.” I looked at my watch and sat back down. No one was actually waiting on the lightbulbs. “That was one scary afternoon. Whew, when I saw the bicycle wheel spinning in the wind. You’re a mother, you know what I’m talking about.”
“I do. I know exactly. Whenever I looked at Philip in the last two weeks, I could not help thinking of David Franklin in a hospital bed in Perry and then of my own kids, knock on wood, safe and sound. I know how selfish that sounds.”
“It sounds honest to me. I felt the same way.” But we both knew that most of Louise’s neighbors would consider such a remark, hinting at the comfort taken from another’s grief, unseemly. Louise’s openness was refreshing.
“So how is he doing, do you know?” she asked.
“He’s hanging in there. I saw him yesterday, as a matter of fact. I visit as often as I can. I have to. David’s recovery is in my hands. Not literally, I realize, but there’s this basic primitive reaction when you’re involved in saving a person’s life. Nothing altruistic about it, either, believe me. Some kind of instinctual higher primate drive.”
I told her about stopping the car, how part of my mind had seen something was wrong before I looked back and saw the bikes in reality.
“God, it was awful, full-of-awe awful. I mean, somewhere out there David’s parents were going about their day’s business without a clue, their thoughts wrapped around the number forty-five or the peppermint flavor of their chewing gum or whatever adult epiphany they might be wafting through.
”
Louise looked across the playground, considering. “We couldn’t survive if we didn’t block out bad possibilities,” she said.
“That’s the goddamn truth. Imagination is glorious. I’m an artist. How could I create without it? But imagination can be paralyzing. Especially if we’re talking mother and child. Believe me, try riding in an ambulance with someone else’s kid hooked up to monitors measuring God-knows-what, knowing that at any moment, as soon as the driver radios the hospital and some social worker at the hospital dials her number, the karma of that kid’s mother’s moment will shatter into a thousand pieces, every one sharp enough to cut glass. Meanwhile, I was the one rocketing down the highway, holding her kid’s hand.”
I looked at Louise and shut my mouth, considering whether she wanted to hear all this. Aside from the fact that she happened to be Philip’s teacher, I had no reason to drop these ruminations on her head. What I was saying was extremely personal, after all. Of course, it was also rather interesting, if I say so myself. And the way Louise was sitting, her pale skin slightly flushed, her hands clenched in her lap with the effort of following what I was saying, she was obviously fascinated. I explained about my daydream foretelling the accident. Louise did not even flinch. Instead, she leaned forward and spoke intently.
“You know I have read in a book how someone was ‘transported.’ The author said it was as if a door were opening up and she could see a whole new world on the other side, brighter colored, more boldly outlined.”
“Yes,” I said, impressed. “That’s it exactly.”
“You know,” she went on in that innocent north Florida twang, “all my relatives and the girlfriends I grew up with here, I love them dearly, but I know them all so well, know exactly what to expect.” Louise shifted on the step, crossed and recrossed her legs. “Well, it’s just that my friends and I, we can practically finish each other’s sentences, but we would never talk like this.”
Whatever chemical or spiritual mingling must occur for a friendship to ignite between two women began occurring right about then. The same slight tingle of recognition I’d felt along my spine so many years ago back in West Hartford, when I knew, without knowing their names or anything else about them, which two or three among the group of twenty almost indistinguishable little girls in Mrs. Crispin’s first-grade class would become my friends. The same knowing I’d had in high school, in college, in any crowd of women, but different from the sexual ignition light that clicks on around certain men. I can’t put my finger on the particular frisson of impending friendship, but when I’ve felt it I’ve known, and I felt it then sitting on the step with Louise, the children cartwheeling and chasing each other around us.
As I began to describe another dream, Louise stole a glance toward Esther Parks still sitting on the bench by the jungle gym, grading worksheets, her skirt scrunched around her thighs so it wouldn’t blow up unexpectedly.
“Such a tight ass,” I said, and Louise tried to swallow the giggle that slipped up her throat.
“Anyway, I am driving with Dylan, not in Miranda, in some kind of red convertible. Me in a red convertible, can you picture it?” She shook her head, grinning. “Anyway, we have to cross a body of water. Now usually, in my dreams, I am a man. It makes sense I guess. But last night I was me. Very female. More female than ever in real life.”
“You don’t think you’re feminine?” Louise asked.
“Feminine enough. So anyway, there is a bridge and we start across and the bridge gets lower and lower, closer and closer to the water. Soon the waves are lapping at the tires, and I am still driving, wondering whether I have enough speed to skim across the surface and save our lives, Dylan’s and mine. I can see the shore the whole time.
“Can you just see it!” I slammed my hand against the carton so hard that the glass bulbs rattled like crazy. We both looked and held our breaths as if we could repair any broken bulbs that way.
“What’s one broken lightbulb more or less?” I shrugged.
“Is this how you come up with your boxes?” Louise asked.
“Sometimes.”
“I love how you fill them. I go out of my way to check out new boxes in Mrs. Gallagher’s display window whenever I go downtown. They remind me of when I was a little girl and used to collect shells, ribbons, hair barrettes, whatever I happened to pick up. My momma used to look at all the bits of this and that gathered in my room and call it turkey stuffing, as in ‘Clear all that turkey stuffing off your bed, young lady’ That’s how I think of your boxes. In a good way, I mean. I don’t pretend most of the combinations make logical sense to me, but they are so pretty, and a few seem almost funny although don’t ask me to say why. They all have your stamp. All those tiny sculptures and miniature paintings of yours, the pieces of machinery, the beads and weavings. They’re like your dreams.”
“Well, thanks,” I said. “Really. Thank you, Louise. I can call you Louise, can’t I?” Teachers can be touchy about how they’re addressed, as I have learned thanks to Esther Parks among others.
“Louise is fine.” Her cheeks reddened. “Of course.”
“Well, Louise, would you like to have a cup of coffee or something after school this afternoon?”
Louise was clearly flummoxed. I might as well have been a boy asking her to the high school prom.
“I don’t think I can,” she started to say, then stopped herself. “Well, come to think of it, my boys have Scouts until five.” She smiled. “Sure, why not.”
I looked across the playground. The sun had turned a corner in the sky and now light was outlining the kids, turning them into cutouts against the landscape. God, it was beautiful, the sheen that slips over everything down here at odd hours of the day sometimes.
I stood up and stretched my arms toward the flat pancake of sun overhead. Pulled forward by its force, I began to dance toward the teeter-totters. The kids gathered in a ragged circle around me and began to follow. Philip, awkward and hesitant at first, was there with the others stepping and swaying, lifting their arms, singing a nonsense song we made up as we went.
All those bare legs and arms going going going. Like notes on a flute. I mean for that moment I could not imagine myself anywhere else in this world.
“Will you look at that?” I called over my shoulder to Louise.
But the period bell was ringing and Louise didn’t hear me or look upward to see the migrating birds flying high above in a thin black blade that left only the barest shadow in their wake.
Four
“YOU ONE selfish bitch of a white girl.”
Evie Pinkston tongue-lashing me. July 15, 1970, shortly after three in the afternoon. Was it a condemnation, a warning or a statement of fact? Whichever, it has been blowing in across the Gulf at me these last weeks, distracting me in the studio, sometimes even rousing me from my bed. I can’t seem to shut Evie out like I could sixteen and a half years ago. But back then who was listening? Anyway, it was too hot to listen in that airless University Avenue apartment, heavy with heat and the odor of last night’s burnt rice.
I had just confided—proclaimed might be the better word— that I was pregnant.
“Preggers, with child, in the family way, pick your euphemism.” I’d laughed, probably half-hysterical, though I would never have admitted it. Hell, I don’t like admitting it now.
“No,” Evie said, slowly putting down her pencil and placing the sheet music she was transcribing back into its folder.
“Yes, and I’m keeping my baby. No one”—meaning my parents—”is going to change my mind.”
“What about the father?”
“Believe me, a baby and parenthood is not part of his life plan. Let’s just say he’s out of the picture.”
That was when she called me a selfish bitch of a white girl, obviously thinking worse. What did I expect her to say? I should have known, must have known how she’d react. We’d been sharing the apartment for six months by then, a lifetime in those days, ever since my original roo
mmate dropped out of school to join an ashram in Nevada. Evie’s music scholarship didn’t cover board, she told me when she answered my ad, so she was always looking for a cheap deal on rent. Once she moved in, we spent the typical roommate hours together. Meals, an occasional movie, weekend afternoons at the laundromat. Having my first black roommate, God knows I was eager for the friendship. What lefty, hippie college girl with lofty ideas of universal love wouldn’t have been? But were we really friends? No, not really.
Our lives ran on separate paths. Race was only one difference. And race aside, Evie was not an easy person to know. The truth? The truth is that I never was confident I knew her. She unsettled me; not many people can claim that ability. I’ve always been pretty damn comfortable with who I am, but around Evie’s deep amber elegance, her exquisite self-control, I felt unkempt, illogical, shallow. Like a selfish white girl. Which, in fact, I was. So, why out of all my women friends—and believe me that was a season when sisterhood was powerful and plentiful—did I go to Evie Pinkston about my pregnancy? Shit, it’s obvious, isn’t it?
“Only us black girls do that ‘cause we got no choice.” Ms. Evangeline Pinkston of Little Rock, who normally spoke with clipped precision, slipping on dialect like a favorite old sweater conveniently rediscovered at the back of her closet. A joke that was no joke. Infuriating.
“I’ve got news for you,” I threw at her, full of myself and my righteous womanhood. “Every white girl I know, if her period’s late or she forgot to go by the infirmary before class for her morning-after pill, starts fantasizing, ‘What if I am?’ “
“That’s why I stay away from men,” Evie shot back, and I shut up because she had me. She was not about to let anyone or anything sidetrack her ambition. Not Evie.
“So you’re going to have this baby, and then what?” She shook her head, more to herself than to me. “O Lord, have mercy.”
Her fierceness shamed me. Fierceness might seem a strange way to describe Evie. Not a hundred pounds with her coat on, that husky whisper of a voice, and the permanent expression of calm about her light brown eyes. But those eyes streaked with yellow sparks whenever she played her violin. I loved to sketch while she practiced, although I’d lose my focus, drifting upon the billows of music, gossamer as the orange blossom fragrance she wore—who else but Evie would wear cologne in 1970? Who else but a black girl who dressed only in pastels and pearls, who claimed she didn’t know Huey Newton from Fig Newtons. Delicate as that music was, even my untrained ear heard the muscle rippling and flexing underneath. People talk about my intensity; God knows I cut quite the figure around here. Well, compared to Evangeline Pinkston, I’ve been a lightweight my whole life. A featherweight. Weightless. I mean, she was a genius.