I shook my head. “The girls could show up.” I was still undone by Daddy’s call, by the idea of a trip back home. I didn’t want to take off my clothes and make sex in the afternoon, just because we had the opportunity. I shut off the AC unit and grabbed my keys.
“I should have a place,” he said, looking mournful. He’d been in the garage apartment behind his folks’ house since a non-amicable divorce.
“Thanks for the thought,” I told him.
I felt comfortable with Karl, that’s probably why we’d lasted so long, in a casual way. True, he had that generally slick look of most realtors: barbershop haircut, rep tie, starched shirt, a jacket he could drape over a shoulder if needed; but behind that front, he appeared real enough. He’d not had an easy life, and still had an ailing mother, a depressed dad at home, and a complaining ex. But he didn’t paint the picture any darker than it was, and he could be cheered up by almost any kind of film. When Terrell died, he had provided me a lot of shoulder and not much talk. Both most welcome.
Plus he asked Birdie questions. A gift money couldn’t buy.
“Why ‘Birdie’?” he inquired, when she chose her new name.
“That’s what my dad called me. Didn’t he, Mom?”
“He did,” I said. Truthful to an extent, recalling Buddy’s former calls: How’s the birdie these days? She look like you? You living with anybody? This had been something she seemed to need in recent years, stories about her daddy.
“I have a friend called Oisie who says that’s Birdie in French,” she told him. She pronounced it “wee-see” and flapped her hands.
“The head cheerleader in my high school was named Robin. She was something special.”
“You ever have a date with her?”
“Would I be here if I had?”
“You might be, Karl. You don’t know that you wouldn’t be.” A foot shorter than he, she blared her tuba voice in his direction.
When she’d got accepted as a Junior String Project scholarship student, he’d asked, “How come you picked the cello?”
“It sounds the best of all the instruments.”
“How’d you decide that?”
“I listened at the string recital and it made me happy every time the cello came in.”
“It’s as big as you are.”
“You’re thinking about the bass. That’s the big one.”
“Robin the head cheerleader played the bass.”
She’d giggled. “Now you’re teasing me, Karl. If she’d played the bass, you wouldn’t be here now, I bet.”
“Smarty.”
Like all smokers who’ve quit smoking, Karl chewed the end of his pen when he was with clients, and a wad of gum when he wasn’t. The sound of his jaws and the killer air-conditioning in his Honda made a little white noise for us as he drove down the service road, along the one through street out of Old Metairie, across the railroad track, over the bayou. We pulled into a cul-de-sac in a neighborhood that, although just a stone’s throw, just a crow’s flight, away from ours, might as well have been in another parish. The homes were larger, the lots were deeper and with established plantings, but the property taxes were half, the asking prices less, and the schools worse. Also the houses looked entirely different from the small pastel cottages or the one-room-wide shotguns in our old, enclosed area. They all had one-story fronts and large two-story backs that looked like add-ons.
“How come?” I asked Karl about that, as we disembarked on the sidewalk in the heavy heat.
“When these houses were built,” he explained, getting out his octopus of realtor’s keys, “they were taxed on the number of windows on the front. So you put the major square-footage on the back. This used to be a settlement of well-to-do merchants; then, after the end of World War Two, it began to go downhill. Now it’s on the rise.” He showed me the names of previous owners: Jacques Goudchaux, Simon Herrman, Alf Brown. “Now we’ve got triracial and they all put up British coats of arms in their family rooms.”
Workmen had taken the weekend off, but left all their gear. Outside, we passed a Pot O’Gold portapotty; inside, drop cloths, ladders, sanders, paint cans. Rugs lay rolled in the wide entry hall and framed portraits of children sat stacked on the floor.
Karl led me up the curving stairway to a bedroom shaded by cottonwood trees. “This used to be the nursery, I think. Maybe later, the mother-in-law’s room? If I had it, I’d use it for an office. Nice space.”
“This bedroom would hold half my house.”
“Location,” he said. “Bad schools, big lots.” He folded his sunglasses into his pocket and stuck his gum on the edge of the windowsill. He gestured to me to come with him. “Look here,” he said, reaching something down from a high shelf in a bare double closet. “I left this where I found it. I wanted you to see.” He handed me a letter. “Check the date.”
I read the neat penmanship on faint blue paper:
Miss Louisa Blancet
Miss Jayne Atkins
Miss Theodora Talley
Within three days send five copies of this letter, leaving off the top name and adding your name to the bottom. Send a hanky to each of the above names. Pin your name and address to each hanky. You will receive fifty-five hankies—if the chain isn’t broken. You will start receiving hankies right away.
It’s fun to see where the hankies come from.
Yours for fun,
The Hanky Club
DECEMBER 7, 1941
Tears stung my eyes. The letter reminded me of my mother. Of her drawer of ironed handkerchiefs: hemstitched, lace-trimmed, embroidered, scalloped. She would have been—thirteen. Off in East Texas, starting, perhaps, a hope chest, learning what was expected of females. I had an image of her, a girl like her, with rich auburn hair and pale skin, sending off a letter to her friends on what we came to know, from school, as Pearl Harbor Day. The outside world, the coming war, bad things, not a part of her life.
A nice letter—in a not-nice world.
“Is this for me?” I asked, wiping my eyes on my T-shirt sleeve.
“Sure.” Karl looked pleased, his square German face turning a little red. “I thought since you fancied those old roses, well, this seemed to fit in. I thought you’d get off to it.”
“I do.” I sniffled. The flimsy blue stationery, which I tucked in my shorts pocket, made me think of my sister. How there had been a time when I’d have called her with this first thing. Asking, “Do you think our mother sent one like this?” “Of course she did, I bet she did, I know she did, let’s ask her,” my sister, when she was young, when we were close, would have answered.
Sometimes, like today, when Birdie stood in her old-fashioned cello-playing dress, sturdy legs apart, chin thrust forward, eating her veggie sandwich, music still in her head, I would remember Terrell. How Terrell had been at that age, such a serious pianist, no makeup, glasses sliding down the bridge of her nose, chewing on her lower lip, making great fortissimo sounds come from our parents’ rebuilt upright piano. Before she became the blond, beautiful, perfect daughter.
“Unnh—,” I sniffled.
“Does this mean I at least get a cup of coffee?”
I dug a crumpled Kleenex from my pocket. “Maybe we can scrape together enough for an alien movie.”
5
Dear Mother,
Daddy said on the phone last week that you wanted to have all of your grandchildren together for your birthday. What a fine idea, and we are delighted to be included.
I hope you are bearing up under the dreadful heat and dry skies. We’ve had high winds and battering rains, as I’m sure you’ve read about. A tropical storm, they are careful to call it, since hurricane season is not considered to begin until August. This weather is very hard on outdoor gardens, but I have covered my roses with tarps and hope this will blow over, so that I may bring you a bouquet when I come. I wish I could bring some of the rain also.
Enclosed is a long-ago chain letter a friend of mine shared with me; her mother found it stuck in an old phot
o album. It made me wonder if you had any letters saved from those days or from after the war, perhaps from your courtship with Daddy. Wouldn’t the grandchildren love to see them?
I am hoping to find a sleeveless linen dress for your celebration, perhaps in the lemony yellow I know you like.
Love,
Ella
ONE VIOLET LANE
OLD METAIRIE
I’d taken Birdie’s suggestion—in fact I had also taken Birdie—and combed through the dresses at the secondhand shop in the Pink Mall, but it was a consignment shop, everything what I’d call resort wear, Florida clothes: sweaters with appliquéd flowers over matching floral-print silk dresses. Not for me. Only the people who sold them would want to buy them.
Then I looked under Thrifts in the Yellow Pages, finding a Recycle, a Salvation Army Store, a Second Hand Roze, and one called Your Turn, which appeared to be connected to the old Episcopal church that I had pretended to attend with Terrell. Second Hand Roze had clothes I would have sold my clunky Chevy for: long skirts made of tissue-thin cotton, skinny cotton tops stitched at the neck and sleeves, in black and navy and claret, classy things you could wear all year in our climate. But to what? And with whom? To water my houses? To talk to Birdie’s cello teacher? To eat popcorn on the fourth row of an indie film with Karl, who always parked his gum under the seat? But at Your Turn, there was the dress I needed. It wasn’t yellow, it was a tad too long for daytime styles (better than too short), and about a size too big. But, hey. It was a celadon green, the only flaw a slight faded streak across the shoulders in the back. Brief sleeves and a ribbon-edged collar. A dress begging (in vain) for pearls. My daughter got an elephant-gray jumper, tie back, buttons down the front, in a size made for someone at least six feet tall. So big it looked as if it had a dropped waist.
“You can’t wear that,” I said. “It swallows you.”
“Felice’s mom can cut it off. She sews. And Grandmom will love it.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s not something, you know, I would ever buy myself, so she’ll think you bought it for me.”
“Jeez—” What had I done to deserve such a child?
Tonight, with Birdie done with her practicing, on the phone to Felice and brushing out her damp Botticelli mass of hair, I sat on my bed in the dark, listening to the steady beating rain. My tenant, the schoolteacher, went off to stay on the Virginia shore with her parents for the months of July and August. She still paid rent—to hold her half of the duplex—and she didn’t run up any utility bills, which I paid. But I still had to check on her place, make sure the flooding wasn’t messing up the plumbing, that there weren’t leaks, that there wasn’t water seeping in somewhere, ruining rugs or clothes. Summer hurricanes when she was gone were all mine to handle; so were the ones in September when she was here.
I’d spooked myself, thinking about planes being grounded, about bad weather, planes getting caught in an updraft or a downdraft or in the squalling winds. Maybe we shouldn’t fly after all? I tried to read, to look through my antique-rose catalogues, to fall asleep, but I kept seeing my sister in that little Piper Cherokee, its wings icing up in the sudden sleet.
She’d called me the week before she left to tell me, “I’m going out to meet him in Notrees, I actually am, Mr. Emu. I can’t keep putting him off. He wants us to, you know, get together. To tell everybody. And I want that, too, I think.” She sounded excited, keyed up, uncertain.
I’d been happy at the sound of her voice, thinking this a Christmas call, a part of me wishing we were going to be in Austin with the rest of them, a larger part of me glad that I wouldn’t have been able to come even if I’d been invited. From before Christmas to Mardi Gras was my second-busiest season. Skiers packed up their whole families and headed out to Colorado. Plants had to be coddled through changeable weather—from almost warm to suddenly bitter and biting—and less natural light in the shorter days.
It took me a few seconds to grasp what she was saying, to understand her words. “You mean leave Red?”
“I don’t know, Ella.” Her voice lifted. “Maybe.”
“You really love this guy.”
“We’re crazy about each other, but we never have time. You know? I guess I’m going out there to find out. You think, when you get together with someone on the quiet, the way I did with him, that it’s going to be time out from the stuff you do every day. But it isn’t. I feel like we became lovers, and then all of a sudden we’re dealing with summer camps and car inspections and root canals. We might as well be married. Not really, but I mean what you want with someone new is to forget all that daily business you get farther and farther behind in, like the Whatever Stables, where you shovel it half as fast as they make it. I know it’s been rough this year out there in Notrees, but that’s all we talk about. It’s been a rough year here, too, if you get down to it, with Rufus having a midlife. But when I take off my Wonder Bra and panties, I want to zone out and just, pardon me, fuck my mind blank. But it doesn’t work that way. He talks about how it’ll take five years to grow back the beef they sold to slaughter. How they’ll have to put down the emus, too, if the drought drags on. Sometimes when we’re together he doesn’t even take his boots off, much less his pants. He just sits and talks. We’ve got to get away, to have some time.”
“What will you tell everybody? The folks—and Red?”
“I’m saying there’s a Mexican furniture mart in Odessa. Who’ll ever check?”
“Maybe you’d like to really come see me this time, to get away and think about it?” Although it panicked me, the idea that she actually might, I meant it.
She didn’t answer right away. Then she said, “You know Mom and Dad still have that pitiful upright.”
“That you used to play.”
“Well, it really got to me over there at Christmas. ‘Oh, Terrell will play the carols for us, won’t you, honey?’ That’s all they ever wanted, me to show off when they had company. It was another social skill, like ballet or tennis or sailing. Forget being serious about music.”
“You were good,” I told her.
“Was I?”
“You practiced all the time.”
“Mother used to tell me it was ruining my posture. She just wanted the end results.”
“You were good,” I repeated.
“I don’t know if I was or not. Anyway, it’s too late now.” She forced a laugh. “Did you see this article in the paper, you must’ve, AP wire or whatever, how one in every eight plant species is under threat? These botanists around the world spent thirty years working on a Red List of Imperiled Plants. I mean these people who are saving whales and owls forget it’s the plants that convert sunlight to food for us to eat. I sent them a donation, some conservancy. But you know what I thought, Ella? I thought I’d give every single thing I have, including, maybe even including, Mr. Emu, to have spent thirty years of my life working on one single thing. You know?”
“I do,” I said. And I thought of Henry, the head rose gardener at Belle Vue, who really did what I only pretended to do.
“Honest”—Terrell finished up the call—“I owe you one, for listening to all this stuff and not telling a soul. Maybe I will come for real one of these days. See that fancy pink house of yours and eat in that French place you wrote me about.” And she sounded like she almost meant it.
I’d found myself thinking about that call a lot lately, probably because I was going back home again. Taking myself to task because somehow I hadn’t done something: begged her not to go, got her to postpone the trip. But naturally I didn’t, because I knew she wanted me to understand and be on her side, and cover for her if she needed it, if she didn’t want to come back. Still, I wondered what all that had done to Red, and if he knew, or what he knew, and how he was handling not having had a chance to work it out.
You never knew what went wrong with other people’s marriages. I couldn’t have pinpointed the minute things went sour with Buddy and me, when bed wasn’t enough
. Maybe if I’d had more sense—but then if I’d had more sense, I wouldn’t have come to Louisiana with some hunk of a guy I didn’t really know, expecting everything to work out the way it was supposed to in your life. But if I could have picked one marriage and called it perfect, it would have been Terrell and Red’s. She’d waited so long to be sure, and he’d waited so long for her to say yes. If any two people should have known each other, they were the ones.
Besides, how could she find anybody more decent or easier to be with than Red Hall had been? At least when I knew him best. And I couldn’t believe that just because he’d got to be R. Rufus Hall, attorney-at-law, he’d changed into someone else. He seemed the same kind of accepting guy he’d always been the few times I’d seen him since I left town. I remembered when I went back pregnant with Birdie, trying not to react to the way Mother looked anywhere but at my bulging middle, the way she carefully did not mention what she could see with her own eyes, Red had come in and right away given me a squeeze, and said he hoped it was a girl and that their little boys, then two and three, could sure use a cousin. I remembered the two of us, Red and I, sat on the sunporch at Mother’s while everyone else busied themselves with the festive birthday meal. We’d watched the boys, Borden and Bailey, run about in their Sunday rompers, and talked about nothing much.
He’d had a way, in his law school days, of pulling off his glasses and rubbing the corner of his eyes with his knuckles, if he was concentrating, or putting them on top of his head, jamming them in his mop of hair, if he was talking to you and wanted to see your eyes. It made me smile, that visit, how he would reach a hand up to his temple, realize nothing was there, and shake his head, as if just remembering he had contacts, then lean his arms on his knees and clasp his hands. “Maybe we ought to take these two rowdies out for a Blue Bell Supreme ice cream cone,” he’d suggested, knowing, I guess, that nothing tasted better to a woman with a gnawing stomach than ice cream. But then Daddy had come in to say brunch was ready. And Terrell, still looking like a Bluebonnet Belle at thirty-two, had rounded up her sons. While Mother suggested to me, “Perhaps you’d like to freshen up before we eat, dear.”
Ella in Bloom Page 3