“We are about to learn the twist,” Nora said. “There is no hanging back and no salvation from it. By suppertime I want to see those hips wiggling like there’s no tomorrow.”
She put a record on the machine and started it.
“Come on, baby,” Chubby Checker growled. “Let’s do the twist.…”
In the middle of the room, Nora planted her feet and threw back her head and held her hands out as if in a gesture of submission or supplication. Her hips began to gyrate in a circle, but her feet remained planted. She seemed to swell with the music, until her whole body was bobbling on the surface of the insistent beat. She wore blue jeans and a T-shirt, but she might have been naked. Peyton felt her face burn, but something in her own hips and pelvis responded to the tug of the music, too. She smiled, hesitantly.
“Come on,” Nora said. “Both of you, get out here. No, Frazier, you aren’t going to chicken out of this. I’ve always thought you could dance like a demon if you wanted to. Keep your feet still—that’s right—and just move your hips in a kind of circle, in time to the music, and let your legs take you down and up again. Come on, Peyton.”
The music and motion took Peyton and flung her far away, and when she came back she was doing the twist as if she had known how all her life. Her hips seemed to move themselves, knowing this old rhythm. She laughed aloud and looked over at her father. He danced easily and fluidly opposite Nora, his slim hips barely moving, like a good, quiet motor. His dark hair hung over his eyes, and he was laughing.
The record ended, and Nora put it on again. By the time it had played itself out two or three times they were flushed and sweating and moving as loosely as if their joints had been oiled. They might have all been the same age, or no age at all. They had just sagged, laughing, into chairs and the sofa when Chloe came into the room. She stood in the doorway, not speaking. They stopped laughing and looked at her. Her face was ashen under its deep ochre. There were tears in her eyes.
“I don’t reckon y’all heard the phone,” she said. “Miss Agnes done passed.”
Late that night Peyton heard her father come into the living room. He had been to the nursing home and then to the funeral home, making the old, immutable arrangements that one made before consigning a life into the earth. His step was slow and heavy. Peyton did not get out of bed. The abrupt draining of the exhilaration of the afternoon and the cold nothingness of her grandmother’s death had tired her beyond rising. She turned into her pillow and hugged Trailways close and closed her eyes once more. Even when she heard Nora come rapidly down the steps from her room, she did not get up. Let them deal with it, this heavy blankness that was death.
Then she heard the sound of sobbing, dry and rough, as though the weeper did not know how to do it, and she did get up then and go to her door.
Her father sat slumped on the sofa. Nora knelt beside him, her arms around him, his face pressed into her shoulder. She was rocking him slightly, back and forth, and her face was pressed into his dark hair. Her eyes were closed, and there were tears on her face, but they were silent ones. Peyton knew that it was her father who sobbed.
She averted her eyes as if she had seen something obscene and, trembling all over, got the long-unworn amulet her grandmother had given her from her jewelry box and dropped it over her head. She felt its cool weight and looked down. She could see it on her chest now, and she never had before. I’m getting breasts, she thought, and my grandmother is dead and my father is crying.
She slept heavily and long and got up aching as if she had been beaten. Neither her father nor Nora was about, and Chloe was silent in the kitchen as she put toast and eggs on the table.
“They gone to pick out a casket,” she said, in answer to Peyton’s unasked question. “You go on to school, now. There ain’t nothing you can do till later.”
After school Peyton went as straight and swiftly as an arrow to the Losers Club. She longed with every atom of her being to be in a place where no strangeness was. When she got there, the door was padlocked. She went around to the window and stood on a vinechoked cement block that lay under it. The chairs were gone, and the space heater, and the shelf that had held their small refreshments and Ernie’s library. Only the potbellied stove remained, black and empty.
Peyton walked home sobbing aloud. She seemed to hang in midair. Nothing was solid under her hands and feet. Around her, empty space whistled and hummed.
Why is it, she wrote in her diary that night, that if you have one thing you can’t have another?
13
After that, Peyton became obsessed with her Cousin Nora. She dogged her steps in the daytime, leaned close to her when they watched television at night. When they had their sessions in Nora’s room, Peyton steered the talk from books and movies and the casual flotsam of their days to Nora and her life. She was insatiable when it came to the particulars of Nora. Nora’s past from childhood on was fair game for this hungry new Peyton, and her questions were endless. Nora bore them with good humor. This time, for the most part, she answered them.
“Tell about that time after your senior prom when you rode home on the fire truck,” Peyton would say.
“You’ve heard it a hundred times,” Nora would reply, smiling at her from the big bed where she and Trailways were ensconced. It was the end of April now, and the scent of the mimosa tree outside the window poured into the room like a spring creek. You could get drunk on it, Peyton thought. Maybe I am.
“Tell me again about the man in Miami,” Peyton would say. “The one you went to the Yucatán with. Tell about the Yucatán.”
“I’m tired of him,” Nora said. “I was tired of him before we left the Yucatán. What you know of him already is all there is to know.”
“Then tell me something new.”
And Nora would cast about in her memory and fish out another bit of exotica for Peyton’s relish. Her life and affairs were not really exotic; on some level Peyton knew that. On that level she knew that many women had the same sorts of experiences Nora had had, even if they did not have them in Lytton. On that level Peyton knew that her own world had expanded far outside Lytton, even if she had not actually seen that world.
But everything Nora did and said and thought seemed, in these days, to be touched with mystery and glamour, and Peyton could not get enough of them.
She began listening regularly behind the closed living-room door when Nora and her father sat watching television later than she stayed up, or listened to music, or simply talked. The talk was the grail: Peyton waited for some scrap of significance, some portentous word or sentence, something that would illuminate her cousin to her further, or show her her own place in Nora’s firmament. It was a small firmament; it seemed that only she and her father and perhaps Clothilde shone in it. But still, Peyton had to know where her piece of sky was.
One night she heard it, or a piece of it, and it left her sweating and cold. Her father and Nora were talking when she got to the door, and it was obvious they were talking about her. Her face burned, but she did not leave her post.
“…can’t let her just monopolize you,” her father was saying. “I’ve said it before. It seems that you’re never without her nowadays.”
“I don’t mind,” Nora said, and there was a smile in her voice. “She’s good company. She’s better company than anybody I know except you.”
Peyton’s chest swelled.
“I think it started after her grandmother died,” Frazier said. “And it seems to me she doesn’t go to that club thing of hers anymore. It could be that with both of them gone, you’re the only sure thing she has in her life right now. I only hope it doesn’t get burdensome. She has to move out into the world sometime.”
There was a long silence. Peyton stood as still as death.
Then Nora said, “Frazier, I can’t be the only thing in her life. I can’t hold her up; I can’t. It isn’t good for her, and I can’t…I can’t stand the weight of it. I’m the wrong person for that.”
“I t
hink it will all change next year or so,” her father said. “Meanwhile, if you need for her to back off a little, I’ll put a bug in her ear.”
“No,” Nora said. “Let’s see how it goes.”
Peyton crept back to bed and curled up under her afghan with Trailways. The night air coming in her window was almost too warm, but she was cold to the bone. “I can’t stand the weight of it,” Nora said over and over in her ears.
“What does that mean?” Peyton said to herself, almost weeping. “I don’t know what that means.”
But in the following days nothing changed, and Peyton gradually relaxed into their old routine. But she did not feel quite so safe anymore, so borne up simply by the presence of Nora. It was as if she went through the days with her muscles tensed for flight.
The obsession deepened.
One Saturday on the cusp of May Nora went in the afternoon to tutor a Negro child in English.
“Huckleberry Finn,” she said, getting into the Thunderbird. “He’s having a hard time with Jim. I think it’s the first time he’s ever really thought about what slavery meant.”
“I thought that was a children’s book,” Peyton said, swinging on the door of the car.
“You thought wrong,” Nora said. “It’s one of the great pieces of literature America has ever produced. I think adults need to read it more than kids. Most of us have forgotten how clear and simple the biggest issues are.”
“What issues?”
“We’ll talk about them when I get back,” Nora said, ruffling Peyton’s hair. “Maybe we’ll make some ice cream and have a seminar on Huckleberry Finn.”
She drove away gunning the Thunderbird, and Peyton went back into the house, scuffling her sandals in the gravel of the driveway. Her father was in his office, and Chloe had gone home. Peyton sought Trailways, but he was not in his morning place on her windowsill. She knew where he would be, though. He would be on Nora’s bed, deep in the down pillow that she had brought with her from Key West, lying on his back with his big paws folded on his mottled belly. It was his afternoon place.
Peyton went up the stairs into Nora’s room, knowing precisely what she was going to do and on fire with it. She closed the door behind her and opened the door to Nora’s closet and looked on the top shelf. The ebony box was there, behind a warped tennis racket. It seemed to shine like a beacon in the camphory gloom of the closet. Peyton could not have said how she knew where the box was, but she had been as sure of it as of her life. She was trembling when she lifted the box from the shelf and carried it over to Nora’s bed and set it down. Part of the tremor was the fear of being caught and horror at what she was doing. Part of it was an anticipation so keen that it took her breath. A mystery was in this place, and it was going to open itself to her.
As she had thought, Trailways was on his back, sunk deep into down and percale. When Peyton set the chest down he grumbled in his sleep and flicked the end of his tail but did not wake. Peyton took a deep breath and felt for the latch on the box.
She had been sure that it would be locked, and had brought a roll of thin wire from the kitchen with which to pick it open, but it was unlocked and opened as easily under her cold fingers as if it were responding to them. The smell of old paper and glue and dried flowers rose to meet her nostrils, and something else, something bitter and pungent and somehow terribly evocative, as if Peyton had smelled it often long ago. But she knew she had not.
She closed her eyes and breathed, “I’m sorry for doing this, God,” and looked into the box for the core of her Cousin Nora.
Papers. Nothing but papers and envelopes, some yellowed, some newer, but none new. The papers seemed to be the ordinary documents that limn a life: birth certificate, passport, copy of a driver’s license, the sale papers and title to the Thunderbird, some assorted receipts and warranties for things that Peyton knew instinctively had nothing to do with the essence of Nora. Some of the envelopes held letters, but they were disappointing: chatty notes from unknown women friends, a couple that might have been from tepid boyfriends, some very old ones that seemed to have been written to her mother. These were tied in faded ribbon. Peyton glanced at the signatures, looking for the presence of her own mother in the letters to Nora’s mother, but there were none. Under the last layer of papers, a plastic bag of dried flowers; Peyton recognized roses and a desiccated orchid, and the grayish powder of crumbled herbs that she had smelled and almost recognized. Nothing else. No photographs, no treasured bits of jewelry, no curls of hair bound in ribbon. Peyton leaned back, disappointment flooding her. Where was Nora in all this? Where was the font of the mystery that was so close it was almost palpable?
She started to close the box, and then she saw that the old velvet lining was slit at its top, some of the fabric rotting away. Her fingers felt the bulk of papers. Without hesitating she reached in and pulled out a thick manila envelope.
Photographs. Here she was, then. Here was Nora. Peyton’s heart thudded high in her throat. She shuffled them slowly, looking, looking. The first few were landscapes, undistinguished and rather flat, with a low jumble of industrial buildings in the background. A shot of a generic ocean, clouds massing over its horizon, scabby palm trees in the foreground. Then a square in a town, with people in motley clothes milling about a building whose architecture looked to Peyton to be vaguely “tropical.” Children darting about in the dirt street, laughing. Chickens scratching in the dust; black dogs collapsed in pools of shade. Flowers hanging low from trees and vines and bursting from pots and window boxes. Even in its obvious poverty and banality, the square had a holiday air. Peyton’s mouth curved up into an involuntary half smile. She thought it was a happy place.
The next photograph was the same view, but in its midst, beside a dry fountain in the middle of the square, stood the virulently pink Thunderbird. Peyton’s breath caught. Here at last was the spoor of Nora.
She lifted the photograph and took out the others. They were of people, people and Nora. Nora, her red hair molten in the sun, black sunglasses on her nose, laughing with her arms around a man and an old woman. A small group of people stood behind them. Nora wore short shorts and a peasant blouse. The men wore pants and bright flowered shirts hanging out of them, the women cotton skirts and tops like Nora’s. The old woman held a small child in her arms, and there were other children at the feet of the adults. All the people except Nora were black. Against them, Nora burned like a pale flame.
Peyton thought that this must be the family Nora had lived with in the small village in Cuba. They were handsome people, but their blackness was so absolute that it was startling. Peyton had always thought Cubans were white with black hair and mustaches, like Desi Arnaz, if she thought of them at all.
She picked up another photograph and saw the Thunderbird again, this time silhouetted against a beach. Here were the white sand and blue skies and turquoise water she had imagined; here was the paradisiacal backdrop she had built in her mind for Nora. There was no one in the Thunderbird. A faded inscription on the back of the photograph read The famous Thunderbird, 1955.
Beneath it was another photograph of the Thunderbird, only this time Nora was sitting in it, smiling at the camera, holding the small child in her arms, her cheek pressed into his hair. The child was reaching out to touch the glittering mirror on the driver’s side. The sun was high; Nora’s hair shone a pure, burnished red.
So did the child’s.
Peyton’s breath stopped in her throat. Slowly she turned the photo over.
Madonna and child was written in Nora’s slashing backhand. Me and the baby, summer 1957.
Whose child it was had not been written there. There was no need. Peyton knew. It was so apparent that it left its stigmata in her retinas.
She closed the box and sat down on the edge of Nora’s bed, trembling all over. Trailways woke and came over and poked his nose under her arm, as he did when he wanted affection. Absently, Peyton stroked him. Even as she did, her mind worked feverishly to assimilate the pho
tograph.
Nora had a child. He was a midnight-dark Cuban child with impossible red hair. He was perhaps a year old in the photograph. Nora obviously loved him. He was just as obviously gone from her life now.
Peyton sat there for a long time. She looked at the photo, but she heard and saw nothing. Then she did: the door opening, and Nora’s footsteps coming into the room and stopping. Peyton did not lift her head. She wished that she could simply die, sitting there.
She felt rather than saw Nora sit down on the edge of the bed beside her. Nora did not speak, but she reached out and took the photograph from Peyton’s fingers.
“I’m sorry,” Peyton whispered. Her voice was strangled. She knew she was going to cry.
Nora did not reply, and then she said, “Don’t be. I would have told you sometime. I wasn’t quite ready to do it now, but now’s as good a time as any. The baby is my son. His name is Roberto. He adored that car. I could always stop him from crying just by putting him in it.”
“Is that why it made you so mad when Boot got in your car?” Peyton said, knowing suddenly that it was.
“I wasn’t mad. But yes, that’s what…got to me. For a minute it was like seeing Roberto when he would be eight or nine.”
“Like Boot?”
“Yes. Roberto is very black, as I’m sure you’ve noticed.”
“Where is he?” Peyton said, and then wished she had bitten out her tongue before speaking. It was obvious that something had happened to the baby, or else he would be with Nora.
But no: “He’s in Cuba, with his grandmother,” Nora said. “If you’ve seen the other photographs, she’s the old woman. She loves him very much. When I was about to bring him back to Miami with me, she hid him away somewhere, and she’s never told me where. I get letters from her sometimes, telling me about him. I know that he’s safe and happy. I probably never will know where he is, unless he finds me when he’s older.”
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