Heartbreak Cafe

by Penelope Stokes J.

  • 23 •

  I painted—or at least tried to paint—everything I saw and smelled and heard and tasted and felt. More than once I wished I had some skill at this, some training that would give me the ability to translate to paper what was up in my head, and lower down in my churning gut. But I kept on reminding myself that it didn’t matter whether the painting itself was any good or not. What mattered was the process.

  The studio was quiet except for the soft shuffling of people moving back and forth to the paint tables and the occasional whispered conversations of the facilitators. In a back corner near the window, someone was crying—a primal moan, an animal in agony. I knew how she felt.

  Gradually, all sound and movement slipped away, into some place of limbo, and became nothing more than white noise. As if it had a mind and a will of its own, my hand moved the brush from palette to paper, choosing its colors, its images. It was like being inside a waking dream.

  The inside of the cave was dark and dank and mildewy. Somewhere down in the distance echoed the faint drip, drip, drip of water. At first I could see nothing, but as my eyes adjusted I realized there was writing on the walls. Graffiti. Written in red, flowing like blood.

  Bastard. Faithless. Liar. Deceiver.

  The blood seeped into my pores. I inhaled its mist on the putrid air, tasted its metallic tang, knew—without knowing how I knew—that I would be poisoned by it if I didn’t get away.

  And I also knew, instinctively, that there was no going back. The tracks led in, not out. I had no choice but to press on.

  I kept moving my brush, and the painting took me one step forward, then another. Something was crunching under my feet—gravel, I thought, but not hard enough. More like . . .

  Bones.

  I looked down. Thousands of them, tiny bones, big ones, some bleached white, others slimed with mold.

  The bones of dreams that had died.

  I stayed there for a long while, trying not to move so I wouldn’t break any more of them. I closed my eyes and honored them, prayed for them, wished them peace. Gave them a decent burial, or at least the best that I could manage. And then at last, moved on.

  The tunnel wound its way through the mountain, and I followed. At last I rounded a bend into a huge, high cavern, so vast that I could not see the top.

  Or the bottom.

  I was standing on a narrow ledge of rock, and below me the floor dropped away into a deep chasm, an abyss that stopped my breath and made my head swim. I teetered for a moment, then got my bearings and looked.

  On the far side of the cavern was another tunnel. At the very end of it, I could see light—just barely, just a hint of day, but enough to give me hope. And directly in front of the tunnel, a ledge like the one where I stood.

  I kept painting, frantically now, hurrying. There was no way to get across. No bridge, no rope.

  And besides, there were people blocking the way.

  Where had they come from? A brushstroke here, one there, and they had appeared, faint as ghosts, lined up like tiny soldiers across the entrance to the tunnel.

  I peered at them through the darkness, and my stomach lurched.

  Boone. Toni, holding the hand of a small towheaded figure who had to be Champ. Fart Unger and Brenda. Scratch. Tansie Orr. Mama and Daddy, and Purdy Overstreet in younger days. Hoot Everett. Peach Rondell.

  And Chase.

  Not Chase. God, I thought, anybody but Chase.

  I filled my brush with paint and leaned forward, intending to scrub him out of the picture. But just as I poised my paintbrush, a hand settled lightly on my shoulder.

  “How are you doing?” Annie said.

  I turned my head and blinked, totally disoriented, the way you get when you come out into the daylight after a movie matinee. I stared at her for a minute as my mind struggled to comprehend the reality of a smiling dwarf standing beside me.

  “Oh,” I said. “Fine. I’m fine.”

  It was the kind of “fine” that really meant, Go away and leave me alone, and although I was pretty sure Annie didn’t miss the message, she didn’t respond to it, either. She just stood there, waiting.

  “Looks like you were about to paint something out of your picture instead of into it,” she said. “Would you like to tell me about that?”

  I wanted to say, Not really, but that would be rude, and Mama always said that the only excuse for rudeness was bad character. So instead I bit my tongue, shrugged, and said, “I made a mistake, and I was about to correct it.”

  “Did you?”

  I frowned. “Did I what?”

  “Did you make a mistake?”

  When I didn’t answer, she went on. “In process painting there are no mistakes, Dell. Even if you don’t like something, even if you want to change it, even if you want to tear the picture off the wall and rip it into a thousand pieces, it’s still not a mistake. It represents something about you, something that came from inside you. So rather than destroying it, maybe you could sit with it for a while. See how it fits into your overall vision. See what that so-called mistake might say to you.”

  She squeezed my shoulder gently and was gone.

  Dang, I thought, for somebody with such short stubby legs, she sure got around.

  At the lunch break, I joined a small group of women leaving the studio; we walked across the street to Bistro 1896 and sat on the patio. It was a little chilly, but none of us wanted to go inside, so we kept our jackets on and ate our Reubens and salads in the early-afternoon sunshine.

  My table consisted of Suzanne of the Nose Ring, one Dreadlocks, a Crew Cut, and three Tattoos. Our server sported her own body art, something I assumed to be a Native American totem marking above her left eyebrow.

  Other than the obvious—which was obvious to me at least, though it seemed invisible to everyone else—my lunch companions turned out to be remarkably normal women. They talked about ordinary stuff, jobs and dogs and kids and husbands and partners, as well as experiences I knew nothing about, like therapy and spiritual direction and meditation and the healing arts. Most were, like me, newcomers to the Painting Experience, but the consensus was that everybody found the process immensely valuable and would do it again in a heartbeat.

  “When I first started this morning, I didn’t know if I was going to make it,” said Beck, the woman with dreadlocks. “It brought up so many painful memories, issues I thought I’d already dealt with.”

  “Was that you crying in the corner?” Crew Cut asked.

  Beck shrugged her shoulders and ducked her head. “Yeah. But it got better. It’s been a rough year—I’ve been through a divorce and the death of my father, and although I thought I had grieved, it’s obvious there’s still a lot of pain inside. Somehow this painting process is releasing stuff I haven’t gotten to in counseling or journaling.”

  I didn’t say much, but I was glad to know I wasn’t the only one. And by the time lunch was over and we were heading back to the studio, I found myself barely even noticing the tattoos.

  I returned to the bottomless cavern and sat with it for a while, just looking. Somehow, after lunch with the tattooed women, the line of little people on the other side of the chasm did not seem quite so threatening anymore.

  I waited. I stared. And just when I thought I was done with the painting and nothing else was going to come to me, it happened. I picked up a small, slender brush, filled it with a ghostly blue-white, and began to paint. One by one they moved—first Scratch, then Boone, then Toni and Champ, and all the rest, right down to Chase, who came last. Stretching themselves out across the open blackness of the cavern, linking hands and feet.

  Forming a human chain to span the gulf. A bridge of friends and loved ones, leading from the darkness toward the light.

  I painted until the bridge was complete.

  And then I wept.

  • 24 •

  Early Sunday morning I packed my bag, paid my bill, and headed back to Chulahatchie. On the seat beside me lay my paintings from the
workshop, the last one on top, that dark abyss bridged by the spectral figures of my friends.

  Traffic was light; even through Atlanta, I-85 was nearly deserted. I tried to listen to the radio, to distract myself, but most of the stations were already playing Christmas carols. The realization that it was almost December hit me like a punch in the gut. My first Christmas without Chase.

  I fiddled with the dials and came across a preacher who tried to convince me that Jesus was the answer. Evidently he subscribed to the theory that the louder he yelled, the truer his words would be—a philosophy I was pretty familiar with, since I grew up attending small-town revivals every summer.

  I listened for a bit, and then turned him off. Dang if I knew how Jesus was the answer, when I couldn’t even figure out the questions.

  If only I could shut up the voices inside that easy.

  In the silence of the empty car, loneliness descended like a fog, and every little noise seemed magnified. The heater whirred as it pumped out warm air, tires thumped across the expansion joints in the highway, wind whistled past the window. A giant heart beating, blood rushing through veins.

  The rhythms took me back, and the memories spooled out like old family movies, jerky and scratchy and indistinct . . .

  It was a Saturday morning in early June, bright and washed yellow with sunshine. The day would warm up later on, but at least it wouldn’t be the stifling humid heat of a Mississippi midsummer.

  Mama stood behind me, fiddling with my hair, trying to tuck a strand of seed pearls in so they wouldn’t shift. I looked in the mirror and didn’t hardly recognize the person staring back. I still felt like a girl, unsteady as a newborn foal, but the reflection in the mirror was a woman.

  A woman about to be married.

  An imposter, I thought. A fraud. A little girl playing dress up, who suddenly found herself in a grown-up body with grown-up responsibilities.

  I desperately wanted to go back, to rewind my life to childhood. To say, This is all a huge mistake, and get a do-over.

  I wanted my daddy.

  I tried to blink away the tears so the mascara wouldn’t run. Mama noticed, and peered at me in the mirror. “You all right, hon?”

  I swallowed at the boulder in my throat. “I’m . . . scared.”

  She laughed. “Why, there ain’t nothin’ to be scared about, honey. Chase Haley’s a good man, even if he is a tad rough around the edges. It’ll be all right, you’ll see. You just relax and let him take the lead, and—”

  A red flush crept up her neck, the way it did whenever she tried to talk about anything embarrassing. She ducked her head and busied herself with the pearls again.

  Then it hit me. She was talking about sex. About the wedding night.

  Lord a-mercy, how dense could this woman be? I’d charmed that snake a long time ago, and not with Chase, either. If truth be told, I’d lost my virginity on the eighth hole of the Riverbend golf course the night of my senior prom, with a bony basketball player named Gant Yarborough.

  Gant’s daddy was a maintenance supervisor at the junior college, and they moved away from Chulahatchie shortly after graduation. It was a good thing, too, because although Gant wasn’t a screw-and-tell kind of guy, in a small town it’s not easy to keep a secret like that for very long. The only other person who knew was Toni.

  Besides that, Chase and I had been doing the dirty deed for more than a year—in his car, in a secluded cove down on the riverbank, even once in Mama’s bed when she was gone for a couple of nights tending to Purdy Overstreet after her hysterectomy.

  But I couldn’t tell Mama any of that—especially not the part about sex in her bed. Let her think that I was nervous about the wedding night. What she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her, and I couldn’t have told her what I was feeling, anyway.

  The best I could explain it, even to myself, was a sense of loss. A grief deep as the ocean. A wave had come up behind me, and lifted me off my feet, and carried me out to sea. I couldn’t feel the bottom of it. And I didn’t even know what had died.

  I just couldn’t shake the conviction that I was missing something, that as soon as I stepped foot through this door, all the other doors and windows would seal up tight behind me. All the other possibilities would vanish, and the walls would begin to close in.

  It wasn’t about getting married in general, or even about marrying Chase in particular. It was about me, about leaving behind a childhood filled with what-ifs and grand imaginings, and settling into an adult world where today looked just like yesterday and tomorrow would look just like today.

  I gazed at my unfamiliar reflection again, the imposter in the glass. Mama had drug the big cheval mirror over behind me, so I could get the full effect of the wedding dress. And there I was, reflected front and back. An image of an image of an image, on and on into eternity.

  “I don’t think I can do this,” I said, mostly to myself.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Mama said. “Just remember, there’s two things in life a man can’t get enough of: good cookin’ and good lovin’.” She smiled at me and patted my cheek. “I taught you everything I know about good cookin’,” she said. “The rest you’ll have to figure out on your own.”

  It was a good thing I hadn’t been waiting for the wedding night as the culmination of all my girlhood dreams. I’d’ve been bitterly disappointed.

  The day dragged on, what with the preparations, the ceremony itself, and then the receptions. Receptions, plural. We couldn’t have dancing or drinking at the Chulahatchie Baptist Church, of course, so we ended up with a teetotalers’ party in the fellowship hall, with punch and petit fours and a lot of boring conversation, and then later in the evening, a bigger blowout at the Knights of Columbus, with barbecued ribs, a rock ’n’ roll band, and a whole lot of beer and champagne.

  Mama didn’t much approve of the drinking, being as she was a Sunday school teacher and all, but she did some selective interpretation when it came to Baptist doctrine, and she could cut a rug with the best of them. By the time the second reception wound down to a reluctant close, Mama had jitterbugged with half the men in Chulahatchie, including the new Methodist minister and the old Episcopal rector, and I suspect she had indulged in a glass or two of bubbly on the sly.

  With one thing and the other, Chase and I made it to the hotel suite in Tuscaloosa exhausted, a little drunk, and not the least bit interested in sex. We fell into the massive king-size bed, slept comatose until noon the next day, and as a result had to pay for two nights and lost half a day of travel toward our final destination of Tybee Island, off the coast of Savannah.

  Hung over and grumpy, Chase mumbled and grumbled about having to drive eight hours for a three-day honeymoon. I had suggested New Orleans, which would have been half the distance, but he wouldn’t hear of it.

  It was dark when we got there, another day lost, and too late to go scouting for one of Tybee’s famous seafood restaurants. We settled for a burger and a walk on the beach, but it wasn’t quite like the scene in my imagination. Moonlight on the ocean is only romantic if you’re in a good mood to begin with.

  Day two wasn’t much better. I wanted to take the historic tour of Savannah. Chase wanted to play golf. I wanted to take the Pirate Cruise and see the lighthouse. Chase wanted to go deep-sea fishing. I wanted to explore the shops. Chase wanted to lie on the beach.

  In the end our honeymoon was, as Boone would say, “a harbinger of things to come.” Chase went his way and I went mine, and at the end of the day we came back together over dinner and sometimes a roll in the hay.

  The pattern was set. He didn’t seem to mind. Shoot, he didn’t even seem to notice.

  But I looked in the mirror and saw those images reflecting themselves, back and forth, back and forth. All the way to a point of no return.

  • 25 •

  Chase wasn’t a bad husband. He always worked hard, provided well, brought home a paycheck every week, and didn’t give me cause to suspect he was up to no good, at least not u
ntil the very end. He just wasn’t—what’s the word? Attentive.

  I musta caught something rubbing elbows with the artists and hippies in Asheville, because I can’t remember ever thinking such a thing before. Where I come from, most women didn’t concern themselves with whether their husbands were attentive. They were just grateful if he didn’t drink or gamble or beat up on them or bang the new church organist in the choir room on Wednesday nights.

  But wasn’t that what Brenda Unger said about Fart? She might not have used the word attentive, but seems to me that was what she meant. He was a good husband, a good father, a good provider, but she wanted more. Or maybe she needed more, just to survive without losing her soul in the process.

  I reckon Chase was pretty much like everybody else’s husband, his mind on man stuff. A woman’s dreams or needs or longings simply weren’t on his radar screen. He worked and brought home a paycheck and grunted his thanks for a good meal and then fell asleep in his La-Z-Boy in front of the TV.

  Lord, I hated that ratty old chair. Toni always called it his “Bubba chair,” and when he was alive, I couldn’ta pried him out of it with a crowbar and a stick of dynamite. Now it was out of my living room once and for all, moved up to Scratch’s little apartment over the restaurant, probably covered with cat hair and weighed down by the books he was always reading. Chase’d have a cow if he knew I’d given it to Scratch.

  But Chase was gone.

  Grief and rage sneaked up behind me and smacked me upside the head, and suddenly the landscape of highway and berm and trees outside the windshield swam and wavered in the shimmer of unshed tears. Dang. When was I gonna get over this? When was it gonna go away for good?

  I was sick and tired of hurting. Sick and tired of feeling the pain and anger surge up without warning or permission. Sick and tired of being sick and tired.