Inside the shop, Louisa turns over a plate and finds that it costs two dollars. That’s enough to buy a tank of gas for the car. That’s the cost of their motel room. You could buy a horse for not very much more than that, couldn’t you? At some point, maybe. Not now, no one rides a horse anymore. And if you did, you would have to spend more than two dollars to buy one. Two dollars would buy you—what? A bridle.
But it’s an awful lot of money to spend on a souvenir plate that one of her children will set in a china cabinet for show. Bert will know best what to do about all this. She beckons him over and shows it to him.
“Who were you thinking we’d give that to?” he asks, and Louisa is ready to tell him, but when she opens her mouth, no name comes out; the answer is gone. “Lou?”
“I—well, I can’t seem to remember.” She turns the plate in her hand, considering. It has a painting of some big old famous hotel on it, and there are palm trees in front, and at the very bottom are blue ocean waves and the name of the hotel and the year, 1951. But that can’t be right because it’s 1910, isn’t it? Maybe a year or two later, but surely no more than that. Time hasn’t gotten so far away from her yet.
“Why don’t we give it to Iris,” Bert says. “She’s got that cabinet to put it in.”
“Sure,” she says uncertainly. “But how about this one with the lighthouse? Mrs. Moeller might like something like this.”
Bert levels her with a steady gaze. “Mrs. Moeller’s dead, Lou, and you know it.”
She blinks at him, wide-eyed. After a moment she starts nodding slowly, but he can tell she’s faking it: she doesn’t remember anything about their old neighbor dying. “Poor Mrs. Moeller,” she replies. “She sure was a help when Joseph was ill.”
Does she remember about Joseph? Does she know that her favorite child has been dead even longer than Mrs. Moeller, that they never got to bury him because he died of an infection all the way over in Europe during the Great War? When they got the news, Lou sank into one of her spells, the longest ever, up to that point: for nearly half a year she hardly said a word, forgot to wash herself or the children, hurt herself with the sewing needle so often that at last he had to take away every needle and pin that he could find in the house, put them all in a box that he hid in the barn. She was so racked with grief that her milk dried up and Hazel, less than a year old then, had to drink cow’s milk like the rest of them. Iris and Rena kept Hazel alive; their mother might not have noticed if she disappeared altogether.
Louisa’s holding up an ashtray now, a bright blue enamel one with sculpted waves and, on the bottom, where the cigarettes get stubbed out, the words Beautiful Biloxi! “Hazel might like this,” she says.
He decides to test her: “Who’s Hazel?”
She gives him an incredulous look. “Why, she’s our daughter, Bert. What in the world is wrong with you?” Then she calls to Edith, who’s standing at the door of the shop, looking out at the rain, to come over and see what they’ve chosen. “Just look what we found for Hazel.” She hands the ashtray to Edith, then adds, almost as an afterthought, “Of course, she won’t ever see the ocean any other way.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because she’s not like you.” She pats her daughter’s cheek. “She’s no brave adventurer.”
When she steps away to examine some other items in the shop, Bert puts his face close to Edith’s and says, “I wouldn’t feel so proud. You ask your mother who she thought she was talking to just then, and I’d bet five dollars it ain’t you.”
Edith’s no bull dyke. There were a few of them in the WAC: short-haired women who wore stiff white shirts and smoked Marlboros, who walked with their legs two inches farther apart than was normal. The first one she met was a woman who went by Elroy. Edith assumed that this was her last name—it was common practice in the Corps to call strangers by their surnames—but it turned out that the woman’s last name was Deveare. “How’d you come by Elroy, then?” Edith asked, and the woman, though shorter by six inches, tipped back her head as if she were looking down from a great height. “I came by it honest,” she replied in a voice so husky Edith might have thought it was a man speaking to her. “How’d you come by yours?”
She’d never met a woman like that before, but she had met what she was. What she, Edith, understood herself to be. When she was nine, a lady had come to the house and given her a book. She had no idea how the meeting came to be, unless the woman was an Amazonian angel sent down from heaven with the sole purpose of showing Edith she wasn’t the only one of her kind in the world. The woman wore a cowboy hat and had a long gray braid down her back, and she towered from a mountainous distance as she considered Edith. “Dr. McBride,” she said.
“Who?”
“I’m Dr. McBride. Who are you?”
Edith stood with her shoulders back and tried to look magnificent. “I’m Edith Baumann.”
The woman asked her age, and Edith replied to the month. “And your mother?” she asked. “Is she at home?”
“No.” Edith squinted up the road to where her mother had gone two hours before to help a neighbor tend to a sick pig. “Are you a cowgirl?” she asked, staring at the woman’s head.
The woman laughed. “I’m sorry to tell you I am not.”
“Then where did you get your hat?”
“I bought it a long time ago to replace another that I had.” She peered up at the trees and frowned.
Edith waited for her frown to fade before asking, “Do you doctor people or animals?”
“Neither, and you do ask a lot of questions.” She cleared her throat. “I’m a doctor of philosophy, which means that I tend to our collective brain and to our many ways of understanding.” She reached down and grabbed a twig out of the top of her boot, snapped it in two, and tossed it into the grass. Then she put the book into Edith’s hands and uttered the mysterious sentence: “This is for you.” Or at least that’s what Edith decided she’d said. Really, the woman had spoken in a foreign language, one she couldn’t recognize. And yet, she understood. When the woman turned and walked back down the road toward town, Edith watched her until she disappeared behind a stand of trees a half mile distant.
She’d thought the book would hold a message especially for her, but it turned out to be filled with religious poetry. That was all right. It wasn’t the book; it was the woman. The woman was the message.
And the message sustained her. From nine to twenty-three: that’s fourteen more years Edith lived at home, never meeting another woman like her or another girl like herself. But knowing that they must exist in the world. And when the opportunity came to leave home with a place to go (the posters reading “This is my war, too!”) and a mission to accomplish (“Are you a girl with a star-spangled heart?”), she took it; she jumped in with both eyes open. Not looking for love, not even thinking it was possible that another woman could love her, just wanting to meet people from different places, to see all the different variations of a woman that were possible in the world. Her first kiss was with a fellow nurse, who laughed good-naturedly afterward to hide her own embarrassment. It wasn’t until Edith met Moira after the war that she learned that friendship wasn’t a necessary step in the process. The first time they were alone together, Moira took a curl of Edith’s hair and put it between her lips. She liked a girl who looked like a girl, she said, but who went after what she wanted, like a man.
Edith had been so high on nerves in that moment, she didn’t stop to wonder if that’s what she liked, too. She took her cue and played the role that was assigned her.
The maid is down the hall when Edith returns; her cleaning cart is parked in front of the door of a closet. How to talk to her without some flimsy excuse—the need for a fresh towel or a new roll of toilet paper? Every option is a request, and inevitably the wrong one. What she really wants is for the woman to speak to her. To come fill up the space in Room 208 with her presence.
Edith walks past her own room to the cart. The maid is rummaging in the clos
et and doesn’t see her, but when at last she steps back with a stack of towels in her arms, Edith says abruptly, “Could I get one of those?”
“Sweet Jesus on the cross!” the maid yelps, dropping several towels. “You scared me.”
“I’m sorry. Let me help—” Edith quickly squats down to collect them and is finished before the other woman has the chance to join her.
“Just set them right there on top of the cart,” she says when Edith is standing again. “You said you need one?”
Something about the exchange feels different, and it takes Edith a second to realize that it’s the lack of a “ma’am” or a “miss.” Every southerner she’s met—at filling stations, at the hotels, in the shops and restaurants—has tacked on this form of address as a matter of course. Especially the Negroes, who seem to put it at both the beginning and the end of every sentence, and sometimes sprinkle it in the middle, too. She’s not sure what to make of its absence now. “Yes, if you would,” she replies when she sees the maid peeling one of the still-folded towels from the stack. “That is, if you have any extras.”
“Oh, sure I do.” She grins suddenly, a brief flash of brilliance that shows her dimples and also reveals that she’s missing her back teeth on the bottom. “I’ve got dozens of them. Thousands.”
Edith laughs and is grateful that the woman doesn’t ask why she needs it. “What’s your name?”
“Mabel,” she responds. A second later, her eyes dart away, as if suddenly regretting that she’s revealed this information.
“Mabel,” Edith repeats. “That’s a nice name. I had a friend—,” she begins, but then breaks off. Moira and Mabel really aren’t similar names, after all, and there’s no reason to bring up the past. After a moment, she says, “I’m grateful for the towel, Mabel.” She’s started to turn away when the maid asks for her name. Glancing back over her shoulder, “It’s Edith,” she replies.
“How nice. That’s a very pretty way to be called.”
The woman’s voice contains something it didn’t before. Something in the tempo of the syllables, the soft fall at the end of the sentence. The way that last word conjures up the image of her hovering over Edith and saying her name again and again.
“Mabel,” Edith says, turning back fully now, “I was hoping you might help me with something else.”
“What would that be?”
Edith takes a quick breath. “I want to have a nightcap later, and it would help to have a glass to drink from. Do you have any idea where I could find something like that? A glass?” She tilts her head. “Or better yet: two?”
A few seconds pass, enough time for Edith to nearly be felled by nerves. She worries that a line of sweat is forming over her lips and eyebrows, that her hair is coming unpinned at her temples. Mabel looks and sounds nothing like Moira, but the feeling in Edith’s stomach is similar to the first time she spoke with her girl in Chicago. It’s hopefulness combined with fear. And she finds herself wondering if her legs will give out beneath her, if blackness will blot out her vision. She holds her breath until Mabel says softly that she supposes she could find two glasses lying around somewhere. “I could drop them off later tonight,” she offers. “How’s ten?”
“Ten would be grand,” Edith says, letting out all the air in her lungs in a little explosion.
The maid laughs as she pushes her cart away down the hall, repeating the last word—grand, grand, as if she has never heard it before.
“Edith, give me the keys.” Bert holds out his hand, palm up, and wags his fingers.
“We’ve been over this, Daddy. You know we decided that it’s better if I do the driving.”
“We? Who’s ‘we’?”
“I don’t want to fight about this again. It’s raining cats and dogs, and you’ve already slipped twice today—”
“That’s not the rain, it’s my feet.”
“Daddy.” She looks at him, and he turns away, harrumphs.
They drive to an Italian restaurant that the motel owner recommended when Edith asked where they could go that was a little farther afield. “We’ll get tired of eating at the same places every day,” she explained to her parents. After the experience with the shrimp, Bert’s wary of eating even stranger food—he’s never had Italian, doesn’t know what it looks or smells or tastes like—but Lou’s eyes got bright when the motel owner suggested it. Why not humor her, he figures. But the place sure does seem strange. At the restaurant, he squints at the menu for thirty seconds, not recognizing a word. “You order for us, Edith,” he says with a frown.
His daughter calls the waiter and then rattles off some dishes she says she’s sure they will like. All this is old news to her: after Chicago and as a war nurse in Africa, Bert figures she’s been acquainted with people even odder than the little man hovering over their table, whose thin mustache and dark eyes make Bert feel uneasy. The man is probably an anarchist, a spy. His face looks like it belongs in a newspaper.
The waiter disappears and returns a moment later with a bottle of wine and three glasses. Edith gives her father a staunch look. “I thought we’d celebrate a little tonight,” she says as the man upturns the glasses with a flourish and pours. Then, quickly, before either of her parents can protest: “If you don’t like it, you don’t have to drink it, you know.”
Once the waiter has gone, Louisa leans forward and puts her nose over the glass. It’s a very pretty color, but the smell is mostly vinegar and a little bit chalk. A strange smell, if the tiniest bit familiar. Not very, though. She’s not sure she wants to try it at all, but then—she’s had it before, hasn’t she? “Bert?” she says. “Haven’t we tried something like this?”
“We have a sip every Easter,” he says, “just to honor the Lord. But you and me, Lou, we ain’t drinkers. We don’t drink wine or anything else much like it.”
“But won’t you try it tonight?” Edith asks. “Daddy? Ma? Just a little sip, that’s all. I’d like to make a toast, is why.” She raises her glass, and Louisa picks up her glass, too, and waits. There was a wedding, she remembers, and a celebration at their house. One of their daughters was getting married, and Bert gave a toast. None of their other children had a party at the house, but this one had, and Bert said a few words and it was very nice.
After a pause of several seconds, Bert puts his hand on his glass and gives a little nod.
“All right,” Edith says, raising her glass higher. “What I wanted to say was that tomorrow we’re going to see the ocean—or the gulf, anyway—and neither of you has ever done that before. I first saw it when I was going overseas, and I haven’t seen it since I came back home. It’s not like anything else I ever saw in my life. It’s big enough to remind you how small we are, but it’s a grand thing, and what I wanted to say was that it makes me glad to know you’re going to have that same experience. I’m happy to be on vacation with you both. So here’s to you, Daddy.” She drinks from her glass. “And here’s to you, Ma.”
Louisa takes a small sip of the wine, barely lets it touch her lips. She doesn’t much care for the taste, but it’s the polite thing to do. “Thank you,” she says. And there’s Bert, sitting across the table, gazing right at her with water in his eyes, tears on his cheeks. He’s moved, the silly thing. She could almost cry, too, seeing him moved like that. Really, she could.
Back at the motel, Edith says good night and is ready to head up to her room when Bert asks her to come in and sit awhile. “We’ve got a radio,” he says.
She glances at her watch, the car keys jangling in her hand. It’s close to nine o’clock. She’s got the time. “All right,” she says.
Inside, she sets her purse on the bed and goes over to switch on the radio. It’s a large one, with several large knobs. Edith drops the keys on the desk and fiddles with the dials until a station comes in. There’s Nat King Cole singing “Mona Lisa.” She stops, remembering a dark theater and Captain Carey. Moira beside her in the dark, their fingers laced beneath the armrest.
“That’s a
nice song,” her mother says behind her. “I’d like to hear it through.”
Edith turns from the radio. Her parents are seated side by side on the edge of the bed, like they’re sitting in church, concentrating on the sermon. The song ends, and another begins, and Edith pulls the chair out from the desk and lowers herself into it. Half an hour, she decides.
But after ten minutes, she’s getting impatient. What if Mabel comes early and she isn’t in her room? What if she left her bed unmade, or forgot to put away her stockings? After the fourth song ends, Edith pushes back her chair and stands. “I’m beat,” she says, faking a yawn. Then she kisses her parents, takes her purse from the bed, and bids them good night.
Bert is brushing his teeth when he hears a door close. “Lou?” he calls out, and at the same time pokes his head out from the bathroom. The room is empty.
Cursing to himself, he rinses his mouth quickly and then crosses the carpet to the door. He stumbles once—this darn room, tight as a cigarette box—but catches himself on the chair that Edith was sitting in earlier. Then he opens the door and steps out into the hall.
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