Swan, page 8
She didn’t tell J. J. that she had walked down to the nurses’ station. Doors into the rooms along the hall were open and she tried, as usual, not to look at the shriveled bodies with diaper bulge propped in chairs looking out into the hall for some sign of activity. She avoided looking at the woman with fist-sized tumors all over her face and neck, but stopped to speak to Besta Warren, who was from a nice family and had simply fallen apart at fifty and had been making hideous turquoise and blue afghans here ever since. By the time she got to the nurses’ station, she had forgotten what her brother wanted.
Now she remembered. “Wills wants so little; it was too bad he didn’t get his Co-Cola.”
“He’ll get over it. He gets over everything else, doesn’t he?” J. J. was alarmed at Lily’s leaps. She’s on the brink, he thought. He’d seen her like this before, when they’d lived through a hurricane warning and she’d feared the House would blow off its foundation and lift into the sky. “I’m going to shower, then let’s fix some dinner.” In his old room, he flopped backward on the bed. Christ, J. J. thought, I left those perch in the sink.
LILY JUMPED when J. J. came back downstairs. He looked like a pure apparition of Wills when he’d come home from medical school at Emory. J. J.’s hair was too long. Wet from the shower and slicked back, his hair shone blue-black under the kitchen light. He was tan and barefoot. “Too pretty to be a boy,” they’d teased him as a child. He had Wills’s speckled green eyes, but his eyelashes were curled and thick. He didn’t quite have Wills’s height, but he was built solidly, while Wills was lanky and more elegant, Lily thought. He’d changed from what had appeared to be a torn undershirt into a proper white shirt with short sleeves. He never wore anything but white shirts, never cared about clothes a bit, and, on the two or three nights a week he slept at the House, he always put on a spotless one, leaving his fishing or hunting clothes in a heap on the floor for Tessie to pick up. A grown man stepping out of his pants like a four-year-old.
Lily felt like something carved of wax that had started to melt. J. J. heated leftover butterbeans and ham and she sat at the kitchen table. “The day your mama died,” Lily began. He popped open a jar of bread-and-butter pickles and fished out some for each plate.
“Lily, we’re not going to talk about any of that now. You’ve had a hell of a day—the worst day of your life. I’ve had a hell of a day. Let’s just eat and then you go straight on to bed.” He could not take even the idea of any histrionics.
She picked at her beans. This was not the worst day of her life. “Where’s Catherine?”
J. J. lowered his fork and shook his head. “Lying on the ground, I guess.”
“When’s Ginger coming? Where’s Ginger now? I made her biscuits.”
J. J. went to the biscuit box. “So you did. Let’s just have some samples of that major talent of yours. Ginger won’t get here until late tomorrow. Maybe you can whip up a fresh batch in the mañana.” My God, if she were not so worked up, maybe I could be allowed to be just a tad thrown myself, he thought. “You know it’s a long flight, then she has to drive two hundred miles. I wish she’d waited before flying off like that. This may be completely over with tomorrow. Aunt Lily, you’ve got to keep calm, try not to get overwrought.” Hysterical, more like it. J. J. spread a biscuit with butter that had softened in the heat. “They’ll catch those idiots. That’ll be the end of it. I hope to God, anyway.”
Lily burrowed into the concept of traveling and time. “You’re right, I’m just spinning. I’m sure Ginger’s sound asleep right now—where is she? I’ve heard they’re kidnaping people in Italy or shooting them in the knees.”
“Rome. I’m sure she’s in a nice hotel. Nobody’s going to bother her knees. She flies out of Rome early.” And she’s probably wide awake, wondering what in God’s name is going on here. He lifted his glass. “Whoop-de-do, Ginger, the divine Lily and I are feasting on cracked crab and champagne, discussing the fine points of thoroughbreds. Come on home, down to the heart of Dixie, summertime and the living is easy, fish are jumpin’, root hog or die.”
“Hush, J. J.” Lily smiled even though she didn’t want to. With J. J., she sometimes felt that she and Wills were young again, sitting together while their mother snapped the wilted flowers off the centerpiece and their father wandered into the living room to listen to the radio. “She drives too fast. She’ll be here for supper. Maybe she’ll bring some of that cheese she brought last time. She’s thrilled to pieces over this work, digging around in the dirt pulling up little things nobody would want. She had this eentsie clay foot she thought was the prettiest thing.”
Lily stared at the back door. “Everyone saw her spirit. You could tell right away that she was somebody. She always lifted her chin when she turned away from you. Like that.” Lily looked at him, then at the wall, slowly raising her chin as she turned.
“Who’re you talking about?” But he knew.
“Oh, that Catherine—but I was talking about Ginger, too. She has always been the sweetest thing. She used to bring me a tussie-mussie on May Day. But Catherine—hair black as yours, that’s where you got it. Wills’s hair was a rich brown, like mine, before he went snow white. They stole the show wherever they went. She could be tart-tongued.”
“You’re talking about Ginger or Mother?” Irritated, he followed her drifting even if he didn’t want to. The tall dining room windows opened to the night sounds, the wild chorus not so different from the voice of Lily.
“That Ginger almost won the state debate when she was in high school. The segregation mess, I think they were arguing about even then. Lucky they didn’t have guns, those demonstrators. Guns go off. That’s what guns are for, to go off.” She paused. “And they will keep going off for the rest of our born days. Catherine always wanted her way.”
J. J. kept quiet and ate. She was on a tear. Deep shock, probably. Let her river run.
“I’ll never forget that day. I felt so sorry for her. Little Gin-Gin shivering and crying like she’d never stop. Holding on to that doll she’d outgrown and yanking at her own hair. That hair’s her glory. Like a house afire. You ran off and no one knew where you were, adding to the worry. The mystery I’ll never fathom—Catherine was supposed to go to Macon the next day—that red Jaguar she wanted had come in, of course Wills gave her everything she could ever want. I never will understand that; if you’d ordered a car, would you . . .” She trailed off as she dropped three beans in her lap.
“You want a cup of coffee? I’ll be glad to make it. I’m going out for a while.”
Lily dropped her meandering reverie. “J. J., we must remember to ask the sheriff if she still had the envelope.”
“Look, I’m going on out. Let’s leave these dishes.” Let’s sail them out the back door. Hit the fence hard.
“Sugar, there was a note in Catherine’s hands before they buried her. I wonder if it was stolen.”
“What did it say?” He barely could bring himself to ask, from his long habit of cutting off any memory, any fact, any speculation about his mother.
“I don’t know. Maybe it was a good-bye letter, maybe a love letter from Wills. It would be awful if they took it, whatever it was.” He didn’t ask her who put the letter in Catherine’s hand.
“I’ll ask the sheriff tomorrow.” He always tried not to think about his mother lying in the funeral home in the dress she’d worn on vacation. On Carrie’s Island she wore white sandals, which she would kick off in sandy places and dangle from her fingers. When she leaned forward in her bathing suit, he could see a rim of white sand on her breasts and the sheen of suntan oil, which smelled like coconut and sunlight. Her charm bracelet jangled, and holding his and Ginger’s hands, sometimes she’d do a little dance step and pull them along. All summer they’d played canasta, Monopoly, Chinese checkers, and Parcheesi. In the hottest part of the day, she made pimento cheese sandwiches, opened big bags of potato chips, and the three of them sat in the breezeway drinking lemonade and playing penny ante poker. He could still hear the waves breaking, then the quick sluicing back into the sea through banks of coquina shells, a sound like breathing in through clenched teeth.
J. J. DROVE OUT TO THE MILL VILLAGE to have a drink with Mindy. Water sprayed as his car crossed the almost-submerged wooden bridge over Cherokee Creek, which marked the entrance to the village. Rains had swollen the creek where he and Ginger used to play when they went to the office with Big Jim. Beyond the creek the rows of workers’ houses began. He’d seen Mindy a few times since her divorce. Her husband drove an oil truck and last summer had taken hard to the Holy Rollers, which Mindy thought was all crap. His religious fervor supplied a lot of rules but somehow did not now leave him with the moral obligation to pay child support for Letitia, who was now five. J. J. hired Mindy to work at the store, right now stocking shelves and checking in orders.
Although Big Jim’s mill closed ten years back, half the workers’ houses were still lived in. J. J. collected the forty-dollar-a-month rent from each whenever he got around to it. He glanced at one house where he never collected rent, just beyond the creek. Ever since he’d heard from Scott that Aileen Boyd, the woman who lived there, had been Big Jim’s mistress, he’d figured he would just let her be. And maybe it wasn’t true. Scott had heard it through the maids’ grapevine when he was a boy. A cat slept on her front steps. Farther on stood three empty houses he had boarded up after the Adventists complained that teenagers were using them to have sex and drink beer. The square street around the mill was lined with board houses set up on blocks, with slanting front porches and generous yards. Lard cans of geraniums, hollyhocks, so tall they arced, cornflowers and weedy larkspurs ornamented some yards. Most were packed dirt with holes where dogs curled. A few big chinaberry trees along the road provided what shade there was.
Mindy had painted her place sea-foam green, as she called it, and grew a potato vine up strings on either side of the porch. He saw her sitting on the steps polishing her toenails, even though it was almost dark. A patch of gold sky remained over the sprawling brick building where his great-grandfather and his grandfather had for decades manufactured cotton drapery material. Mindy’s father had been a foreman and her mother worked at the looms, but they were now living in Florida and had moved up. He ran a gas station and she worked inside, selling cold drinks and her own fudge. People came from miles to buy her pecan-studded fudge. They were able to send Mindy a little money, always with a note encouraging her to leave this backwater and move to Denton, where she and Letitia could live in their spare room. They could expand the fudge business easily with an extra pair of hands.
J. J. opened the trunk and took out a bottle of gin. Mindy waved the silver-tipped brush at him and wiggled her toes in the air. “Hey, J. J., I didn’t expect to see you. I heard Scott on the phone with his mama and I made him tell me what happened. This just gives me the willies. Are y’all right? You poor thing!”
J. J. realized this was exactly what he’d come to hear. She brought out ice in tall glasses and a bottle of tonic. Letitia was asleep in the front room. J. J. heard the whirr of a fan blowing back and forth over her. He sat down on the steps and poured. Mindy’s toes were the color of dimes. “Silver Fantasy”—she waved the bottle of polish—“that’s me.” Now that her husband was gone, she spent hours on her skin, hair, nails, clothes. Even after six hours at the store—she couldn’t get to work until ten, when she could take Letitia to play at her sister’s—there were hours and hours to fill, hours when she’d shell peas, iron, and she didn’t know what all. She brought home TV dinners from the store and Letitia loved the sectioned foil trays. She’d boil some corn, maybe, or cook some rice, but dinner now took minutes and then the day still continued. Only around nine-thirty, when dark finally fell, did she feel like the day might actually end. She had rinsed her hair in lemon juice tonight and rolled it on orange juice cans. She could see J. J. looking at her springy blond curls. He handed her a drink and sat down beside her on the steps. She pressed the glass to either cheek for the coolness. She stretched out her legs to admire her shiny toes.
Great legs, he noticed. Nice feet, too. Long and thin like a rabbit’s. “My aunt is falling apart. You can imagine. Well, maybe you can’t—I can’t get a handle on any of this. My sister’s flying in tomorrow. They’ve called in someone from the GBI. I hope they’ll solve it soon—tomorrow—and take care of my mother. I’d like to forget this ever happened.” He paused. “Fat chance.” Bad hair, he thought. Looked like she’d run smack into a tornado. But as she turned her head, he caught the fresh, lemony scent and felt a shock of coolness from the strong drink he’d mixed. She was plain but he liked looking at her. She had a straightforward face with pale freckles, a pert nose, and large dark eyes that always looked sleepy. Her thin-lipped smile almost covered her overlapping bottom teeth. She was stacked. Her breasts looked pointed and full, but somehow she missed being sexy. Or maybe he missed, or something. He wanted company, wanted to feel a grand rush of desire that would land them in the middle of her ugly iron bed. It was not going to happen. Maybe the nest was still too warm. “For God’s sake, let’s talk about something else.”
“Okay. Have you seen Jaws?”
“No.”
“Okay. Let’s see, we had a delivery today of tomato paste and barbecue sauces. And a little brat kicked loose the electrical plug of the ice cream box and all the Popsicles melted. Letitia colored in the alphabet without going out of the lines. She talked back to me twice today.”
J. J. laughed, leaned back against the railing, and watched the stars come out. There, his old friend, the Corona Borealis, pointed out to him by his mother from the porch of the cabin on a summer night like this when she was sitting on the log railing and he and Ginger barely swayed in the swing. Catherine’s white hydrangeas grew just up to the porch, moons in wet, shadowy leaves. His mother had taken astronomy in college in order to avoid the math requirement. She remembered the Pleiades, Orion, the Dippers, the Bear. Others she made up. “Look, there’s the Anthill, and there’s the Train Wreck, and over there’s the North Star, just above the Wandering Jew.”
He and Ginger had protested. “The Wandering Jew is a plant at Lily’s,” they’d yelled. “There’s no Wandering Jew in the sky.” Still, they weren’t sure.
“Look, there’s his beard, and just follow the imaginary line—his knees, his feet. Of course there’s a Wandering Jew constellation. There has to be . . .” Below them, the river plunged through the night. They heard the water surging over a clot of logs along the bank. Their father sat by himself out on the dock. J. J. closed his eyes around the image of his father barely touched by the porch light.
Mindy brought out two peaches. She ate hers, skin and all, letting the juice drip. J. J. leaned over and touched the point of her chin with his tongue. She pressed her breasts forward, then laughed and put her arms around his neck. He felt her hard lips against his, then her driving little tongue parted his mouth and he tasted the juicy sweetness of the fruit when she opened her mouth wider, breathing out into his mouth and deeply in, with his hands in her hair, her hand under his shirt. He knew where this would lead. He was willing now, but something stood apart from him, watching him go into action, and would not go. He leaned back, pulling her head down onto his chest. “You’re hard to leave but I’ve got to get back to the House. This day has gone on into eternity. I’m pretty bushed. Lily’s probably wandering the hallowed halls.”
She didn’t answer. He’d done this once before. The night they danced at Lake T the temperature hovered in the mid-nineties even at ten o’clock. Some guy from Osceola who was dancing alone stumbled and whooped and poured a cold beer over his own head. They’d walked outside, where it was fresh and damp, though not any cooler. He kissed her neck, tickled her bare shoulders with a weed, teased her about stepping on his feet. He was a fine dancer and she thought that men who could dance were good in the sack, at least that’s what she’d thought before her marriage. She’d been three years behind J. J. in school and always thought he was gorgeous, nothing like his big old bull of a granddaddy, who’d stand on the back of a truck handing out Thanksgiving turkeys to the millworkers. Like they were peons. She remembered how thrilled her mother was to cook a bird for the holidays. J. J. didn’t have any of the boss man in him. When Scott asked his opinion about a new meat case, he just shrugged and said, “Whatever you think, big chief.”
Mindy was just out of a marriage with a taskmaster. Carleton had wanted his undershorts pressed. He straightened the refrigerator every morning. He flew into a devil-minded fit when he came home and found baby Letitia wandering the yard with a dirty diaper. He had sharp yellow incisors which he bared when he ate. He ate dinner with his fork clutched in his right hand and his left hand on the table curled around his plate in a fist. She liked J. J.’s roll-with-the-punches lifestyle, but the taskmaster, at least, had wanted sex almost every night. “Take that thang off,” he’d say. “You get on me first.” The iron bed had creaked and banged against the wall. She smiled to remember Letitia waking up and calling out, “Mommy, are you all right?” Quick, unromantic, yes, but she was used to the big O on a regular basis. She didn’t understand this holding back. She’d heard plenty over the years about J. J. and various women. She was prettier than a lot of them. Much prettier than Wynette Sykes, whose ears stuck out like Dumbo’s.
“Why didn’t you ever marry?” she’d asked J. J. that night at the lake. Faintly, they heard Jimi Hendrix singing “Purple Haze.”
“Darlin’, my life’s not over. Don’t say ‘ever’ yet.”
“Well, why haven’t you yet? How could you avoid it?”
“You ask a hard question.”
“You’ve been out with so many women.”
“You want a long or a short answer?”
“Have you ever had a long relationship?”
“Now, who’s counting? No, I guess not. In college once, maybe nine months.”
