Nora, Nora

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “Not really a commencement,” Peyton mumbled. She had been thinking with dread about it for some time. “Just this thing in the school auditorium where the school choir sings and a preacher says something, and there are some speeches and stuff. It’s not a big deal. I don’t even think I’m going to go.”

  Nora shot her a keen look.

  “What sort of speeches?” she said. “Who makes them?”

  “Oh, you know. The ones who make good grades and stuff. Mostly they’re teachers’ pets. It’s the teachers who pick them.”

  “You’ll be asked to make one.”

  “No, I’m sure not. I’m not anybody’s pet. None of the teachers even know who I am, really. Besides, I’d hate it. I’d never in the world know what to say. I’d make such a fool of myself that I’d be the winner in the Losers Club for the rest of my life.”

  Nora tapped her unlit cigarette thoughtfully on the table and studied her. “The Losers Club. Is that the club you go to every afternoon? Why is it called that?”

  “We tell each other what dumb things we’ve done that day, and the one who did the dumbest wins. It’s usually Boot, because he likes to wins. It’s usually Boot, because he likes to win and his foot makes him clumsy. He’s always falling over things. It’s really nothing. Just something we got in the habit of doing a long time ago. And it’s not all stupid stuff. Ernie plays music for us and tells us about the theater and literature and all. He’s given me some books. And I think Boot has learned a lot from him.”

  “Hmmm,” Nora said. “Sounds like fun. Can I come sometime? I’m not exactly a stranger. I know Ernie and I know you.”

  “Well, it’s in the bylaws that nobody but us can come. I asked Ernie and he got all cranky about it, but I’ll ask him again. Boot would love it. He thinks your car is the greatest.”

  “Never mind. I don’t want to make Ernie uncomfortable. I’ll meet Boot sometime here. And I’ll tell you all the dumb things I do and you can tell him and Ernie, and that’ll make me an honorary member.”

  Peyton shot her a look. Was she being patronized? But Nora simply stretched lazily. Her green eyes looked past Peyton and into space. No. Not patronized. But something was there, something in the eyes.…

  Nora met Boot the next afternoon, after the Losers Club. He was, Peyton knew, accustomed to going to the house of an old woman in Lightning who looked after many of the children of the women who worked in the big houses. He usually went after the Losers Club and stayed until his grandmother got home, but sometimes the old woman had rheumatism, or went to visit her daughter in Union City, and then he came to the McKenzie house. When she was much younger Peyton had played with him on those occasions, watching him toddling about crowing, bouncing his ball with him. But at some point they had grown apart except for the Losers Club, and on those afternoons when he was visiting, Peyton was usually reading, and he pottered around the kitchen with his grandmother. It bothered neither Boot nor Peyton. At the Losers Club they were fully equal, and that was what counted.

  Boot came in shortly after Peyton had gotten home, slamming the back door and shouting for his grandmother. Peyton heard, from the snug harbor of her bed and bookcase, Chloe starting in on him in irritation, and heard his cheerful, “Well, Mamaw, Miz Liz’beth say she got the high blood bad and I needs to come on over here. She say she be better tomorrow.”

  “Well, you stay in this kitchen and be quiet, then. Peyton studying and Miss Nora coming in from the library any time now.”

  “She comin’ in that car?”

  “Of course she is. You think she flying? You don’t need to be studying that car, Boot. She ain’t gon’ want you hanging around it.”

  “Maybe if I held the door for her she’d take me for a ride,” Boot said ingenuously. “I could probably wash and wax it sometime, too.”

  Peyton heard the front door open and close, and heard Nora’s voice: “Is that the incomparable Meatloaf à la Chloe I smell? Could it possibly be? And biscuits, maybe?”

  Peyton got up and went into the kitchen. No matter what her intentions about reading or listening to her records, when Nora came into the house she was drawn out of her room like a moth to a leaping flame. Light and air and noise came in with Nora. The old house had not felt their like in Peyton’s lifetime.

  It must be what it was like when my mother was alive, she thought.

  Nora dumped her armful of books onto the breakfast table and plopped down in her seat.

  “Coffee before I die?” she said. “And maybe some of that pecan pie from last night? Peyton, are you game for some pie? I swear I…” Her voice trailed off. Then she said, “Well, who have we here?” and Boot’s face appeared around the door into the kitchen, fat cheeks split with a grin.

  “This is my grandbaby Boot,” Clothilde said. “He don’t usually turn up here. He promised not to bother anybody. Boot, this is Miss Nora. You know, I told you. She’s staying with us for a while.”

  “Hello, Boot,” Nora said, looking at him levelly. “I’ve been hearing about you.”

  He hung his head and dug at the linoleum with his toe, and then looked up at her and gave her the full wattage of his smile.

  “I been bearin’ about you, too,” he said. “That your car out there?”

  “It is,” Nora said, sipping her coffee and squinting at him through the steam.

  “I heard you drove it all the way up here from Cuba.”

  “Well, from Key West, Florida. That’s about as far as you can go before you come to Cuba.”

  “With the top down?”

  “A lot of the time.”

  “You get bugs squashed on you?”

  Nora smiled then. “Pounds and pounds of them bugs in my hair, in my eyes, in my teeth.…”

  Boot’s joyous, froggy laugh rang out. “Ain’t that something’? Boy, I’d like to seen all them bugs.…”

  It was obviously Nora’s move, time for her to say, “I’ll take you for a ride sometime,” but she did not. “A few bugs go a long way,” she said.

  There was a small silence, and then Boot said, “You could drive that car to our club meeting sometime. It right up the street. It would look fine sittin’ out in front of the parsonage. And if it got bugs on it I could wash and wax it for you.”

  “Well, I’ll think about that,” Nora said, and she gathered up her books as if to leave. Peyton watched as Boot’s heart leapt into his black eyes, and she knew she had just witnessed that most ineffable of phenomena, the thing they called love at first sight. Because she wanted to show Nora off a bit and because Boot was staring at her cousin with such naked adoration, Peyton said, “Nora says she doesn’t think she’ll come to club meetings, but she’ll tell me about the dumb things she does and I’ll tell you and Ernie, and that way she can be an honorary member.”

  “I bet you ain’t never done nothin’ stupid,” Boot said to Nora. He offered it like a cache of jewels to a queen.

  “Dumber than you can possibly imagine,” Nora said.

  “Tell one!” Boot crowed with joy. This was too much for him, a copper-crowned Madonna who drove a pink chariot and did dumb things.

  “Maybe one day,” Nora said, and she went out of the room and up the stairs. Peyton stared after her. So did Boot, and Chloe.

  “Can I tell about the stockings?” Peyton called after her.

  “If you want to,” Nora’s voice came back. They heard the sound of her door closing smartly. Peyton leapt into the silence.

  “Nora was sixteen, and this boy she’d had a crush on for ages, a college boy, asked her to go swimming with a bunch of his friends. And she bought a new bathing suit and got her nails fixed, but then when she tried on the bathing suit she thought she looked…flatchested. You know. So she took some of her aunt’s stockings and balled them up and stuck them in the front of her suit. Well, she was swimming around having a good time, and she saw everybody looking at her chest, and she looked down, and she saw stocking feet floating out of her bathing suit. She said she like to have
died. Everybody was laughing.”

  Boot yelped happily. “That’s dumb, all right. That’s better than you or Ernie done in a long time. Boy, she sho’ know how to do it, don’t she? Did that boy keep on being her boyfriend?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so. She hasn’t said any more about him.”

  “Then he the stupid one,” Boot said.

  After he and Chloe had gone home, Nora came down to Peyton’s room and settled onto the end of the narrow white bed as she sometimes did.

  “What’s happening, kiddo?” she said.

  Peyton closed her book. “Did Boot make you mad or something?” she said. “He makes a lot of noise, I know, with that boot thing, but he’s a nice little boy, and he can be real funny sometimes.”

  Nora looked at her and then out the single small window into the backyard, where the first forsythia was beginning to spill like a fountain.

  “I’m just not wild about children,” she said. “There’s no use pretending I am. I’ll try to be nicer to Boot, though. I just hope he isn’t underfoot all the time.”

  Peyton saw a curtain fall behind Nora’s green eyes. Something in her was closing like a door. Peyton did not know how she knew this, but she was sure of it. There were distances and secrets inside Nora, then, places she would allow no one to go. She felt an abrupt and marrow-deep need to go into those places, to know those hidden things about her cousin. She realized that what she had been given of Nora was carefully edited and abridged, that an entire continent lay underneath. She must think I’m a child after all, Peyton thought. But she’s never acted that way.…

  As if possessed of some perverse incubus, Boot was indeed underfoot after that. His infatuation knew no bounds. Whenever Nora got out of her car in the afternoon, Boot would rush to hold the door for her, to carry her books and her parcels. Whenever, on a weekend, she set out on one of her slow cruises around town, she would see Boot in the rearview mirror, thumping after her like one of the Seven Dwarves. She ran into his smitten grin when she went to the grocery store, and found him waiting on the front steps in the morning in case she needed the car door opened or something carried. Nora said nothing, but she began to disappear into her room the minute she came home from school, and stopped coming down to breakfast, where, often, Boot would be lurking like a happy frog.

  “Doesn’t that child have anybody else to look after him?” she said once to Peyton, after Boot had offered once more to Simonize the Thunderbird.

  “Well, we all sort of look after him,” Peyton said. “And he’s with me and Ernie almost every afternoon. He’s never any trouble.”

  “Maybe not to you,” Nora said under her breath, taking the stairs to her room two at a time. Even the gregarious Boot would not climb the Mckenzie stairs to the bedroom floor.

  He began to bring her presents: a sack of pecans, a gay double armful of pink thrift that he cheerfully admitted he had gotten from Miss Lucy Jernigan’s rock garden—“She got plenty more”—a piece of quartz that he had shined to a diamond polish, a picture of a Thunderbird like hers, cut out of the Sunday newspaper and glued onto a piece of shirt cardboard. Nora thanked him after every offering, but she never failed to say, “Boot, you simply mustn’t bring me any more things. It’s too much work for you, and I’m running out of room for them.”

  “You can throw the old ones away and I’ll get you some new ones,” Boot said. And he did.

  Clothilde had, Peyton knew, recently forbidden him the house except in a real emergency. She saw Chloe glance often at Nora, her brows furrowed in her yellow forehead. But Nora never mentioned Boot to Chloe, and Chloe did not speak of him, either.

  Not until the honey-sweet day in March when Nora came home early from her tutoring session at the black high school and found Boot in her car, top down, engine running, radio booming out country music audible for blocks. Boot’s eyes were squeezed shut, and his face was rapt with bliss. “Vrroomm,” he was chanting. “Vroom-vroom-vroom!” He did not see or hear Nora until she jerked the car door open and clutched him by his collar and dragged him out of the car. Her face was blanched with fury, and her eyes were slitted. Peyton, watching through the screen door, gasped and went as still as a woodland creature seeing a hawk swoop. This was going to be bad.

  Nora slammed Boot up against the car and bent and looked directly into his face, only inches from it. Her hands gripped his shoulders, and she shook him slightly. His face was blank with terror.

  “Don’t you ever, ever touch my car again, you hear me?” she screamed into Boot’s face. “Don’t come near it. Don’t come near me. Nobody touches that car but me! Where did you get those keys?”

  “They was laying on the kitchen table,” Boot whispered. He was trying to pull away from Nora’s hands. She let him go abruptly, and he staggered a little, then took off around the house.

  Nora stood with her head bent, leaning on the car’s fender, her eyes closed. Gradually the labored breathing that had made her chest heave slackened. Then she turned toward the house. Peyton moved away from the door and scuttled into her room. She did not want to talk about this. She did not want to see Nora’s face like that. She did not want to see Boot’s humiliation.

  No one mentioned the incident at supper. Nora ate with relish and chatted of insignificant and outrageous things, and Frazier took out the pipe he had resumed smoking and smiled at them both through sweet smoke.

  That night Peyton showed herself her movies. She wrote in her diary, Even the air hurts.

  Nora finally went to Boot’s house and apologized to him, largely, Peyton knew, because Chloe’s face was so miserable. She didn’t know what had come over her, she said, except that she was terribly tired and had not been sleeping well.

  “Of course I’ll take you for a ride in the car,” she said, and Chloe and Boot nodded in unison. But Boot did not come back to the house. Peyton saw him at the Losers Club, where he dutifully recited his litanies of abasement, but she said nothing about Nora and the car because he did not know she knew about the incident. But he was somehow diminished, like a photograph left out in the sun, and though he could still make her and Ernie laugh, he did not often laugh with them. It was as if somebody had pulled a plug and drained the green sap out of him. He was, somehow, a wise and wizened little man, not a child anymore.

  It seemed a long time before Chloe began to sing again in the kitchen.

  11

  On Saint Patrick’s Day Nora took Peyton and Frazier into Atlanta for dinner and a movie.

  “I think there’s some sort of parade down Peachtree Street, too,” she said. “We really ought to see it.”

  “You want to take a Scotsman to a Saint Patrick’s Day parade?” Frazier said. He was smiling, though.

  “Why not? Loosen you up a little. Get some of that Hebridean starch out of you. We’ll have you drinking green beer before you know it.”

  “Faith and begorra,” he said. Peyton laughed happily. She could not remember her father’s ever making a real joke before.

  It was a sweet, soft day, and they went in the Thunderbird, all three of them squeezed into the front seat. Nora laughed at the sight of Frazier folding his long body into the little pink car, sitting with his knees under his chin. Peyton, crammed between them, felt a lift and swoop of joy that seemed to have its provenance in nothing at all but the smell of new green and the taste of new-cut grass in her mouth, and the rush of clean wind past her face. It was such an intense, flooding feeling that she closed her eyes against it so as not to cry. Nora looked over at her.

  “Pretty fabulous, isn’t it?” she said softly.

  “Yes,” Peyton said.

  They parked the Thunderbird in Davison’s parking lot and walked up to Peachtree Street. Both sides of the street were crowded with people wearing all shades of green, from emerald to hideous pea-soup. There were many leprechauns in the crowd, shambling along in their short pants and peaked hats, carrying plastic shillelaghs. Vendors on corners were selling paper four-leaf clover pennant
s and decals. Although Peyton could see no bars or taverns on the length of the street, there must have been ready sources for green beer. Half the people around them were carrying paper cups of it; the other half had obviously just discarded theirs. The smell of beer was thick and yeasty everywhere, and Irish songs were bellowed out nearly continuously. Peyton heard “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” and “Toorah-loora-looral” and others less sentimental and seemly: “Peg in a Lowbacked Car,” “The Night They Shagged O’Reilly’s Daughter.” She cut her eyes at her father and he looked back with a little grimace, but he was smiling, too. It was impossible not to smile on this day of breezy sun and singing ersatz Irishmen.

  The parade itself was modest in comparison with the crowd it engendered. The handsome, white-haired mayor came first, in a green Lincoln convertible, followed by sundry other dignitaries in convertibles, all grinning, Nora said, like possums in the middle of cow plops. There was a float bearing a bevy of green-clad young women, all managing somehow to reveal modest cleavage and a flash of leg under their traditional Irish costumes, or whatever passed for them in the Southern Baptist minds of the parade’s sponsors. On a throne draped in green sat the queen of the parade, or whatever she was, in a cloud of virulent green tulle, a headdress of woven shamrocks on her Clairol-red hair and another bouquet of them in her arms. The crowd roared at the float, and some of the leprechauns staggered alongside it, trying to climb aboard. Stern-faced marshals on horseback waved them off.

  “Going to be a whole lot of Irish horse crap around here after the parade,” Nora said, grinning.

  Peyton stared at the green queen.

  “You’d make a much better queen,” she said to Nora. “Wouldn’t she, Daddy? Her hair’s real, and her eyes are green. That girl looks stupid with red hair and those black eyebrows and dark eyes.”

  “Well, there are always the black Irish,” Nora said. “And the very first Celts were supposed to be little dark people who came out of the caves into the light. But I agree with you about the hair. It’s the color of dry red mud.”