Ella in Bloom

by Shelby Hearon

  “Yeah?” He didn’t look convinced.

  “Anyway—” What else could I tell him?

  “How’d you even meet my dad? I mean we only ever saw you and Birdie maybe a couple of times. I didn’t even know, you know, that you used to know my dad.”

  “So many years ago, it happened in ancient times, I met your daddy. Back when he wasn’t anybody’s daddy. In the living room of my parents’ house.”

  “When he was going with my mom?”

  “When she first started dating him.” I looked at Bailey, whose face seemed shut against the talk he’d asked for, trying to figure out how to explain. “I was just a high school kid and the only thing in the world I wanted was to get out of there, that house. Your dad helped me. He helped me run away—”

  “That right?” He looked envious.

  And I wondered how it would have been for these two brothers if Borden, the good older son, had stayed home, the way Terrell had, and Bailey had been the one to slip away one day, hitching a ride somewhere, forgetting to call. You never thought how it was for the one left at home when you were the one gone.

  “So what about the other guy?” he asked, hooking a leg over the railing.

  “Who?”

  “The one, you know, you ran off with.”

  “Buddy.”

  “Him.”

  I sighed. None of this was simple. “Bailey, I’m forty-three years old. I’ve had a life. I happen to think your dad and I might make things a little better for one another.”

  “Yeah. Dad said.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Sort of it wasn’t my business. Sort of ‘What do you know you immature, jejune punk kid? So don’t have an opinion.’ ”

  “What is your opinion?”

  “Him and my mom hurt each other.” He turned his back so I couldn’t see his face.

  “Don’t we all.” I said it gently, stretching my legs and studying the rotting steps.

  “He must like you a lot, I guess.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Him and my mom had fights, but they never said anything about it, not to us. They pretended all the time that things were fine.”

  I shrugged. “Parents try to make things okay by acting like they are.”

  “You do that with that guy, the midget’s dad?”

  I took hold of my hair with both hands and lifted it, cooling my neck. “I still do that for Birdie about her daddy.”

  Bailey got up and messed with a yardstick, and a level he’d found which proved the back step wasn’t. He shook the railing and kicked the side of the house. “Sheesh, Aunt Ella,” he said, “how much could it cost? A few boards?”

  “Don’t ask,” I told him.

  28

  I scrambled into the house to catch the phone on the third ring. Jobs? Love? My child? The tenant? Roto-Rooter bargaining for triple overtime? Calls were never nothing in my skin-of-my-teeth life.

  Hearing the rose lady’s voice, I felt like a teenager being asked to the prom. My favorite client, needing me at her house right away, if I could possibly drop everything and come. She knew it was an imposition. “Ella, honestly,” she pleaded needlessly, “I would not ask on such short notice if it was anything but an emergency. My husband’s daddy, Teddy Senior, you know, the one with all those grain facilities, he’s gone and there simply isn’t time to get everyone to come in. The cats, my babies, have already been left with that exorbitant cat sitter till I could just—”

  “This afternoon?” I breathed out in relief.

  “Could you, Ella, do you think? I’m programming your code into the back door at this very minute. And there are those pesky water bottles. If you could come, I mean now? And we could go over everything? In the time it takes me to write it all down? Be a dear—?”

  I was a dear. Dashing toward the bedroom to pretty up a bit, change into good shorts, mess with my oak-brown snarls, screw my head on.

  “Where are you going?” Bailey, who’d trailed inside after me, watched as I grabbed my car keys.

  “Job,” I told him. “Manna. Funds. We can run the AC night and day.”

  “Give me a sec, will you, to get my shoes on?”

  I wheeled around in my doorway. Having forgotten that strays were not privy to the ground rules of the house. “You stay,” I said. I’d not even ever taken Birdie, nor would I ever take anyone along on a job. I could never take that risk, bringing someone who could break, drop, slosh, move, any precious fixed or growing thing. Or, as youth did, want to talk at my most concentrated moment.

  “What do you mean, stay? Here? By myself?” My nephew sounded close to panic.

  “Not only that, and keep the back door closed meantime, you need to listen for the Roto-Rooter truck, and let him in the front half of the duplex. See, the key’s on this chain, hanging right here.” I stepped back and waved a hand at the key rack by the back door.

  “But what’ll I do? What if somebody—?”

  “Bailey, have you ever been alone two milliseconds in your whole life?” I threw up my hands. “I don’t know what you’ll ‘do.’ Place a lot of phone calls and charge them to your dad’s phone. Redesign my back porch. Wait for Birdie and her friend Felice.”

  I pulled into the Georgian colonial’s driveway like a horse dashing to the stable. Home again. Mrs. Thibaud threw open the back door and gave me a little hug, this client not much older than I was, who’d already lugged the six cobalt-blue water bottles into the kitchen by herself. The whole water-purification industry gone into overtime with this last tropical storm, sending over machines and person-power to help with the reverse-osmosis units and to check the filtration and purification systems. Water, its control and management, a more lucrative business on our part of the coast than cotton. And no way, it seemed, to pipeline our excess straight to Texas’s parched acres.

  She held up a list she’d been writing on, apparently standing at the kitchen phone center. Lovely blue-tiled floors, lovely all-stainless ovens and sinks. Everywhere, small vases of “my” low-country roses.

  Being back came as such a thrill, a relief, that it took a full minute at least for what I was seeing with my own eyes to register. Mrs. Thibaud had on her slim body the very black, button-front linen dress I’d once stolen. I couldn’t breathe. Everything grew dim. I thought perhaps I’d pass out on the spot. The whole thing had been a ruse. She’d brought me back here to accuse; next, the thrift shop green linen I’d tucked away upstairs would be brought out and waved in my face. I thought of getting right down on my knees and telling all.

  “I hate funerals.” She appeared to still be talking. “I wore this to my own daddy’s funeral and I’m going to burn it, I absolutely am, after Teddy Senior’s service. Make a bonfire. They wear white in some countries, don’t they? I know they do. India? But then”—she had to stop and wipe her eyes—“they burn the body with the dress.”

  “Oh,” I murmured. “Oh, Mrs. Thibaud. I wonder, if I could, if I could presume, if you’d let me buy that dress from you, after your, your tragic event? It’s the very one I especially need to go to a ceremony honoring my mother in East Texas at the end of next month. You know how you can’t wear light colors after Labor Day? And I don’t really have anything appropriate, I mean the black things I do—” I was babbling. “Please, I’m sure I’m out of line, I’m sure. I just thought—” I wanted to trade clothes with her at that very moment. She’d fit right into my best cuffed tan shorts and white camp shirt, and show them off better than I did.

  “Ella, Lord, yes. Take the thing. You’re welcome to it. It has nothing but sad memories for me. Look, I’ll leave it here, on this shelf, after we get back from the cemetery. We’re going to go away for a few days and recuperate, this has been the worst, sorriest summer in my whole—Did you see our garage-door opener is on the blink from all the power outages?” She stared at me, a stricken look on her face. “There, Ella, what’s wrong with me? You said your mother. Did you lose your mother and I’m running on like thi
s? What possesses me?”

  I felt light-headed. I had that button-front black dress in my sights. “No, no,” I assured her. “I didn’t mean to say, what I meant, a ceremony, it’s just a sort of—of reunion for these ladies, a fifty-year reunion for a group of girls who used to call themselves the Hanky Club. Pen pals. They’d send each other—”

  But she’d moved on—my mother apparently still breathing and so not in need of our prayers—to explaining about how to feed the rare Chartreux cats without frightening them. “Did I tell you about this extortionist I hired? To look after my babies? At a fee I won’t even suggest. That woman would pull them out from under the bed! For what I paid her! You just tear open the packets and leave them here, see, these blue saucers. No need to go upstairs, you understand? Now here’s where we are, in St. John the Baptist Parish, a number, but no need to call unless this place is up in flames. And my roses—”A dreamy smile came over her golf-tanned face. “Well, they always seem to droop a bit after you’ve been here and gone. I don’t know if I water them too much or not enough. I don’t have that touch. I read somewhere people talked to flowers? Do you do that?” She smiled, a very blond, made-up woman with a lot of energy and general good feeling, who might, in another life, have made a first-class waiter at the Pink Cafe.

  Left alone, I took off my sandals so my feet could enjoy the cool marble floor on the way to the rose-filled atrium. There I simply stood for the longest time, letting the chlorine settle out of the water in the long-necked sprinkle cans. Walking around to see where the natural light came through the skylights as we headed toward the autumnal equinox, as we headed, surely, toward drier weather and a sunny Indian summer. How glad I was to see again the little pink sweetheart Cécile Brünner, the blushing old Noisette, Aimee Vibert, the porcelain and ivory English hybrids. Breathing deep the mingled scents of steeped tea, myrrh, bananas, spice, musk: the many perfumes of the fragrant, ever-blooming country roses.

  Upstairs, I headed straight for the closet, scene of my past crimes. There, in the row of black linen dresses, a space, much as I had left before Terrell’s service when I’d borrowed the crisp and proper garment. Further back, the shoulder-streaked celadon linen, still acting as undergarment, garment-in-waiting, for the splashy, frogged, emerald brocade.

  Joy in my heart, at the thought of full reparation concerning the purloined dress soon to be properly in my possession, I greeted the pair of cats I’d spoken with on two occasions before. “No need,” I said, as they lay on their sides, lithe and langorous yellow-eyed felines, “for me to come up here anymore. And my apologies for disturbing your naps on my earlier visits. I’ll be preparing a small repast for you downstairs, some gourmet—it appears from the nature of the foil container—version of the common cat’s Tender Vittles. Take care.”

  In the kitchen, I left each a rose petal in her blue bowl of water, and, on the blue dinner saucers, mixed half an egg yolk each into the moist preformed food, the telltale shell whisked away in the disposal.

  Patting the shelf where soon my dress would appear, I bent and kissed each cobalt-blue bottle of fresh designer water.

  29

  I cut my hair. A gesture right up there with Birdie shaving her legs, and perhaps out of the same impulse: to look nice. Now that it didn’t matter anymore. Now that my tangles no longer gave me distance. How could I never have guessed that being approved of by my mother would leave me so much more defenseless, exposed, than being disapproved of? How could I not have seen what freedom I had as the black sheep, the prodigal daughter? No wonder my sister had wanted a secret life that no one could touch. And me, all those years, never offering her sympathy, never offering her thanks.

  I had on my white camp shirt, which I’d worn to my unexpected watering job, and Birdie and Felice had donned theirs, used for String Project performances, though they’d kept on baggy shorts. I’d had to call Karl to cadge a white dress shirt for Bailey—who else did I know his size?—since he had certainly not brought such a garment on his slumming trip to the bayou.

  “Ecccchhh,” the boy had said, when I handed it to him, sniffing the shirt the way a dog sniffs another dog. “Couldn’t I just buy one or something at the dinky pinky mall? I don’t need to wear a shirt some dude has worn.”

  “Tell him not to sweat all over it, will you?” Karl had asked, poking it grudgingly out his car window, promising to call me later.

  Mayfair was taking us to the Old Metairie Country Club, dressing us all alike, using us as helpers to deliver the all-pink pre-deb ball gowns. Her way of doing something special for Birdie’s visiting cousin, and of acknowledging his daddy’s wonderful gift.

  She and I had already talked about Red’s offer of the new cello and flute, the night I got back from Texas, after Birdie had been on the phone half an hour pouring out the good news to Felice. “I cannot let you do that,” Mayfair had objected. “I cannot let you buy my girl an instrument costing two thousand dollars.”

  “Listen,” I’d reminded her, “I couldn’t buy my own daughter a two-hundred-dollar cello. I’m standing here with the AC on, hearing the dollars go by, planning to finance a time-share in the Caymans for my plumber. But this is not from me; this is from the daddy of the boy I’ll be sitting, Birdie’s Uncle Rufus, my sister’s husband. He’s doing this for his own private reasons.”

  “You mean guilt?”

  “Something like that.” I explained that the deal was strictly with Birdie, she’d done the negotiating, how much he was putting in, what the girls had saved, what was still lacking.

  “I can manage the difference. Let me at least do that.”

  “You are not to put in a cent and I’m not either.”

  “I’ll have to come up with a treat, then. Take you along to one of my parties or something.”

  This afternoon, late, she met us in front of the club with a large van and two other helpers, also in white shirts, her costumers. She had a permit for me to place on the dashboard of my less than elegant car. We clustered together, our feet damp but back in their shoes. Our girls were not overly impressed with the spectacular pink Moorish edifice at the end of the long, divided, oak-canopied street. The String Project had never played there; it couldn’t be anyplace they needed to go.

  I gave Mayfair a proper introduction to Bailey, who, a gentleman despite himself, shook her hand and thanked her for inviting us.

  “My, you are one good-looking boy,” she said. “These girls inside will flip at the sight of you. You Texas boys.” She threw up her hands. “Once upon a time, a zillion years ago, I married one myself.”

  Our job, now, was to get the varying-shades-of-pink ball gowns delivered safely, one-of-a-kind designs in irreplaceable fabrics, all securely sealed in plastic bags. “Don’t track,” Mayfair directed. “Wipe your feet inside the door.” Her reddish hair freshly plaited, in a russet smock, she was very much in charge, checking with the club manager and the young, brisk pink-party planner.

  Following after her, we looked like the bearers of a feast in ancient days, all with our arms outstretched, holding treasures out in front of us, high off the ground, our offerings. Approaching the castlelike interior, we went under a very long pink awning, wide enough to shelter three couples abreast, flanked by large pots of pink geraniums fresh from the florist. Inside, we went past, but not into, the men-only grill, through the Petit Wedgwood Room, across a dark lounge with the imported thirty-six-foot pewter bar and inlaid pewter wall panels for which the club was noted. In the back sunroom, the dozen girls waited, barefoot, in short shorts, their hair on giant rollers. Taking no more notice of Bailey than they did of the rest of us—we were functionaries—they found their names on the plastic bags and headed off to the dressing rooms. Mayfair Roberdeau following along to be sure things were all in order.

  I wandered around with Bailey and the girls, nobody seeming to mind or even notice we were there. Upstairs on the wraparound porch, the pots of ginger, whose scent I had imagined, were gone. In their place, massed pin
k geraniums and impatiens. And, along with the pots and their fragrance of spice, gone was any wish on my part to make an anecdote of this outing for my mother. What did it matter now, impressing her?

  We looked down onto six green-clay courts, partially covered in tarps. Bailey, a tennis player, pointed out small footbaths for washing the soles of athletic shoes. “The courts are made from Tennessee clay,” he said. “You track green.” Taking in the seats for spectators and the grand reviewing stand, he muttered, “Fucking Wimbledon.” Below us, a couple of water-system trucks were working away with hoses snaking into the building while another truck guided hoses sucking up the floodwater on the patio. We could see the golf course, with a few men playing through despite what must be damage to the greens, and, toward the bayou, the sloping lawn I fancied they used for Easter-egg hunts, slippery with mud.

  Heading for the entrance, Bailey hung back, letting the girls race ahead to find Mayfair. “You come here?” he asked me.

  “Surely you jest.”

  “This isn’t that far from your house. It’s like—close.”

  “Far?”

  “You know what I mean.” He shifted around from one foot to the other, his tanned face straining with the effort to speak my language.

  “You mean, how come this isn’t in another part of town from where I live?”

  “Sort of.”

  How to put these niceties to an Austin boy, used to the clearer demarcations of West Lake Hills and Pflugerville? “Probably,” I searched for words, “some people in the antebellum homes on that wide shady street out there can’t come here, and probably some people a couple of blocks from me in those little pastel places with the magnolia trees can. It’s not, ummm, in the Deep South, it’s not money, or just money. Or mainly money.”

  “That right?”

  “I don’t know, Bailey. How do I know? I’m just passing on an impression. Buddy, Birdie’s daddy, made his living repossessing yachts. He dealt with a lot of new money, some old. What he said to me was, you couldn’t tell. You couldn’t figure it out if you were outside it, and if you were inside it, you didn’t need to.”