“You ride?” Her cane made a hollow thumping sound on the floor. I didn’t look at it.
“For fun, once or twice with a girlfriend.” Her eyes were enormous and as black as her hair. Her face looked thinner than it had in the pictures, her neck longer. She grimaced and leaned on the cane. Under her tan she looked pale. She shrugged.
“I miss it myself.” She said it in a matter-of-fact tone, but her eyes glittered. I looked up at the pictures again.
“I’ll bet.” I blushed, and looked back at her uncomfortably.
“Odds are I’ll ride again.” Her jeans bulged around the knee brace. “But not jump, and I did love jumping. Always felt like I was at war with the ground, allied with the sky, trying to stay up in the air.” She grinned wide, and a faint white scar showed at the corner of her mouth.
“Where you from?” I could feel the heat in my face but ignored it.
“Virginia.” Her eyes focused on my jacket, the backpack hanging from my arm, and down to where I had my left hip pushed out, my weight on my right foot. “Haven’t been there for a while, though.” She looked away, looked tired and sad. What I wanted in that moment I will never be able to explain—to feed her or make love to her or just lighten the shadows under her eyes—all that, all that and more.
“You ever eat any Red Velvet Cake?” I licked my lips and shifted my weight so that I wasn’t leaning to the side. I looked into her eyes.
“Red Velvet Cake?” Her eyes were friendly, soft, and black as the deepest part of the night.
“It’s a dessert my sister and I used to bake, unhealthy as sin and twice as delicious. Made up with chocolate, buttermilk, vinegar, and baking soda, and a little bottle of that poisonous red dye number two. Tastes like nothing you’ve ever had.”
“You got to put the dye in it?”
“Uh huh.” I nodded. “Wouldn’t be right without it.”
“Must look deadly.”
“But tastes good. It’s about time I baked one. You come to dinner at my place, tell me about riding, and I’ll cook you up one.”
She shifted, leaned back, and half-sat on a table full of magazines. She looked me up and down again, her grin coming and going with her glance.
“What else would you cook?”
“Fried okra maybe, fried crisp, breaded with cornmeal. Those big beefsteak tomatoes are at their peak right now. Could just serve them in slices with pepper, but I’ve seen some green ones, too, and those I could fry in flour with the okra. Have to have white corn, of course, this time of the year. Pinto beans would be too heavy, but snap beans would be nice. A little milk gravy to go with it all. You like fried chicken?”
“Where you from?”
“South Carolina, a long time ago.”
“Your mama teach you to cook?”
“My mama and my aunts.” I put my thumbs in my belt and tried to look sure of myself. Would she like biscuits or cornbread, pork or beef or chicken?
“I’m kind of a vegetarian.” She sighed when she said it. Her eyes looked sad.
“Eat fish?” I was thinking quickly. She nodded. I smiled wide.
“Ever eat any crawfish pan-fried in salt and Louisiana hot sauce?”
“You got to boil them first.” Her face was shining, and she was bouncing her cane on the hardwood floor.
“Oh yeah, ’course, with the right spices.”
“Sweet Bleeding Jesus.” Her face was flushed. She licked her lips. “I haven’t eaten anything like that in, oh, so long.”
“Oh.” My thighs felt hot, rubbing on the seams of my jeans. She was beautiful, Victoria in her black cloud of curls. “Oh, girl,” I whispered. I leaned toward her. I put my hand on her wrist above the cane, squeezed.
“Let me feed you,” I told her. “Girl . . . girl, you should just let me feed you what you really need.”
I’ve been dreaming lately that I throw a dinner party, inviting all the women in my life. They come in with their own dishes. Marty brings barbecue carried all the way from Marietta. Jay drags in a whole side of beef and gets a bunch of swaggering whiskey-sipping butch types to help her dig a hole in the backyard. They show off for each other, breaking up stones to line the fire pit. Lee watches them from the porch, giggling at me and punching down a great mound of dough for the oatmeal wheat bread she’d promised to bake. Women whose names I can’t remember bring in bowls of pasta salad, smoked salmon, and Jell-O with tangerine slices. Everybody is feeding each other, exclaiming over recipes and gravies, introducing themselves and telling stories about great meals they’ve eaten. My mama is in the kitchen salting a vat of greens. Two of my aunts are arguing over whether to make little baking-powder biscuits or big buttermilk hogsheads. Another steps around them to slide an iron skillet full of cornbread in the oven. Pinto beans with onions are bubbling on the stove. Children run through sucking fatback rinds. My uncles are on the porch telling stories and knocking glass bottles together when they laugh.
I walk back and forth from the porch to the kitchen, being hugged and kissed and stroked by everyone I pass. For the first time in my life I am not hungry but everybody insists I have a little taste. I burp like a baby on her mama’s shoulder. My stomach is full, relaxed, happy, and the taste of pan gravy is in my mouth. I can’t stop grinning. The dream goes on and on, and through it all I hug myself and smile.
Lupus
“You don’t get home often enough.”
It is August and high summer has fattened all the trees on Old Henderson Road, dried the road to powder and gray loose loam, coating the myrtle and dogwood trees with a flat white alkali stain. Temple sits on her porch while her oldest girl rinses her hairpins in a tub of bleach and spring water. Off in the yard, the dogs raise a dust cloud. I wipe sweat off my mouth and drink tea like I never left home.
Temple slides her palms on the worn porch step, flat and smooth under her hands, back and forth. We watch a long green trailer turn the corner, shear the leaves on the myrtle, just miss the leaning porch, the poplar, the young dogwood.
“That would have done it,” Temple laughs softly, open-mouthed and happy. “I could have put in the new plumbing this year ’stead of next. Anything that big’s got to be insured.”
I nod, scratch chigger bites on my ankles, unable to relax to pissing in the weeds, hoping that trailer comes back and pays for more than the plumbing. She married late, Cousin Temple did, married late and well—a steady boy, one of those Roberts from Asheville, a lean, freckled, still boy, as steady as she was and as quiet, a good son who loved his mother and never ran around like the other boys all the other cousins married early.
Temple rolls a little hair between two fingers and turns her red-tan face up into the sun slanting past the porch beams. This house, yard, dirt road, myrtle trees, kudzu holding the screens on the windows—none of it would stand up to a northern winter, a Yankee tax assessor, or an estate sale. But it puts Temple outside them, a property owner, something none of the rest of the family can imagine becoming. Temple has been an outsider all her life, though living on her own since her mama left her with her own mother when Temple was barely seven—a quiet red-faced seven as she is now a quiet red-faced woman whose hair shows gray where it lies close to her skull.
“You were a bean when you were a girl,” Temple tells me, “a string bean, and your sister was a butter bean. Your mama was a stretch of stringy pork, and together you didn’t make a decent Sunday dinner.”
When Temple laughs, her head goes back. Her long red hair shakes out, and all the gray she has so skillfully tried to hide flakes loose and flashes at me silver and white. “Temple,” I tell her, “you’re finally getting old.”
“Bullshit,” she flares. “And apple butter. I’m just more woman than the men in this town can handle. And I’ve more left to me than most people get to start out.” Then she smiles, oh she smiles! The skin around her mouth that’s aged so dry and tight flushes and fills like the grin on a mewling baby. But her teeth slip loose, and her hand flies up to hide the wolf
grin.
“Goddamn,” she sighs. Her daughter doesn’t look up. Temple’s hand caresses her porch, strokes the soft, worn wood like the lover she barely remembers. “It an’t Robert, you know, but it is, I’d swear. All I have of him anyway. Nights, I seem to hear him breathing, but it’s the walls. They sweat so, they smell just the way he did. And I got to where I don’t care if I’m crazy. I talk to this house like it was him.”
Somehow it is. There was an army insurance policy, a thousand-dollar burial, and a four-thousand-dollar mortgage, plus two more for the plumbing which never worked anyway. In the North, it would have bought nothing: in Asheville only a little more: but out here off Old Henderson Road in 1959 it was an estate for three orphans and a redheaded woman suddenly going gray.
“Lupus,” she says. “It was lupus.” An old story I have heard many times these twenty-five years. Temple scratches herself, and spits, angry now as she was angry then. “Damn doctors, damn hospitals, never said what else. Lupus, you know, kills slow, takes a long time—years. But Robert, Lord, Robert sank into that bed. He died so fast. Weeks seemed like no time. He just melted away.”
Maryat stirs her hairpins. Claire brings a pitcher of tea to the door. I wipe my mouth again, saying nothing, watching the sweat shine on Temple’s cheeks. When I was a child and slept in her bed, I would lie awake and watch the line—eyelids to cheekbones to mouth. Never touched it, never once reached out to touch her cheekbone, though I dreamed of pulling her into my neck, sucking her throat, and licking her eyes. Now I curl my fingers around my hipbones, hug myself, and don’t quite reach out to her trembling hands.
“You never saw the store, did you?” Little flecks of broken wood grain pull up under Temple’s fingernails. “Your mama wouldn’t bring you girls around. Hell, your mama thought you girls were meant to be special, wasn’t gonna carry you around to no honky-tonk roadhouse.” She reaches for me, touching my sun-warmed thigh.
“But it wasn’t like that, not really. The store was across from the high school and clean as a dried peach pit. Scrubbed hollow, hell, I scrubbed me raw. We had pinball machines, and a candy counter, Coke coolers, chip racks, and billiards. No liquor ’cept for Robert’s beer in the back cooler.
“But we lost it, of course. We lost everything.”
Temple pauses, pulls at her tea and frowns. “Hard to remember all that, hard times and craziness. I was crazy, you know, oh yes. We lost the store, the car, even the baby’s bed—all those weeks with Robert lying still, breathing like a train going up a hill. All that slow, crazy time, and me crazy. Me just out of my head. I was howling at Granny, screaming at the girls, tearing at myself. Hated myself, like I’d done it, like I’d brought it on him. Nobody in his family had it, but Granny said we’d had a cousin with it, so maybe it had come through me.
“It was important then, how it had come on us. Later I didn’t care, but then it was like that was the only thing that mattered.”
Dust drifts down in the sunlight. Another truck turns the corner and shakes the porch. It’s a short cut, this road and Temple’s lot. Truckers come through and wave. Temple ignores them, slaps her porch, watches the dirty paint flake down. The dogs in the yard, tied off to a tree, howl and kick and lie down again, panting in the heat.
“I got mustard grass, you know, and yellow nettles. Grow ’em cause it makes people mad, ’cause an’t nobody can tell me anything. It keeps people away, makes sure no one touches what’s mine.”
They still have fireflies in Greenville, and green tree frogs, katydids, and rock-sucking worms. The muscadines still hang in sheets off the trees behind Old Henderson Road. Once every few years, Temple takes up with some traveling man, someone she can’t see staying around. She wants nobody permanent now, not after Robert and the girls, that first baby, everybody she ever loved.
“Temple’s nothing but trouble,” the cousins claim. They complain of her life, her girls. “Hard-assed, cold-hearted woman.” Everybody agrees. “Thinks more of that ratty-walled house than her family, thinks more of herself than a woman should.”
Off Old Henderson Road, the porches tilt. The paint chips off. Temple’s bathroom is still out back of the pines. She has the cousins come over to prop the windows, wire back the roof where the slats are sliding down. Where the paint has gone the wood stays bare and rain-marked. She won’t paint again, says it will just flake off in the heat.
Kids come over from West Greenville, drive their pickups right up on the grass, hide behind the dead vines that shield the shed out back; stare in where Temple stores broken chairs, empty boxes, an extra bed. They giggle a lot, smoke dope, and occasionally fall through the rotten boards.
“You gonna pay for that, you white-eyed son of a bitch!”
Temple threatens to pen that shed for chickens, set traps, loose the dogs. All she really does is talk to the uncles real loud on the phone.
“Come up here and shoot me a few of these bastards!”
Sometimes she doesn’t bother to dial. Sometimes she doesn’t bother to roll over or get up, lies in bed for a day, her face set and angry so the girls know to stay away. Gets up thinner but quiet. Goes back to work as the crossing guard at Greenville South-East, the only work she’s had since Robert died.
“You ever read that Flannery O’Connor? I got the book from Macon a few years back. Heard she’d had the lupus, thought it might be in there, but God knows it an’t. You read that crazy woman? Made me think people’re worse than I thought, and I thought bad enough. But the worst was some of it made me laugh and then made me ’shamed. Thinking, what kind of woman laughs at such troubles? Babies drowning themselves for Jesus, preachers and old ladies that get their whole families shot dead ’cause they forgot the right highway.”
Flat, flat, her hand, her face, the sunlight on the porch. Temple’s memory of a boy dead now twenty-five years. “I’d hate to think it was the lupus.”
“Get her to think of something else,” Mama asked me. “People say she’s going crazy out on that old porch all the time.”
Nobody really knows Temple. The women smile about her, say, “Lord God, but she loved that man.” Everybody says it’s a pity, how she sits, how she doesn’t get on with her life, take another husband, have another child, plant zinnias or baby’s breath and go on. Go on.
I sit on Temple’s porch and drink coffee, drink tea when the morning heats up, talk to her of New York and California, of cities she’s never seen. I watch how she laughs, her red hair swinging from side to side, bringing the gray and white to the surface, bringing out the shadows and wrinkles under her eyes.
“How can you live in a city? All those pictures like to make my heart hurt. I could smell it—hot concrete, tar, and piss. No green for miles. No color a’tall. Lord, where’s the life in it?”
I tell her about the color of night, the lights on the bridges, the hot shine in the women’s eyes, the cold glare of metal moving fast. I tell her about the cold winter light shining on flat stacks of slate, hanging over the New Jersey highways, the cars growling rock music out their vents—how tight the people wear their clothes, how tall the buildings, how sweet the dawn after you do not sleep for days.
The silence answers me. I wipe my fingertips on the porch, smell myrtle and crushed onion through the dust of passing trucks, watch Claire cross the yard, how she swings her arms and throws back her head, her white face with the black eyebrows etched as high and fierce as crows across the highway. I have not been this still in years, have not heard my own heart when I was not shadowed by full dark and bourbon, not looked into a face that mirrored mine as Temple’s does—bone to bone, ancient grief to daily rage.
“How do you do it?” I ask her. “How do you live this far from the rest of the world?”
“What do I need the world for?” Temple laughs at me. “Besides, I got sugar, just like Granny. Came on two years ago, and ’pressure, they say, though I an’t checking. What good is it to know you gonna die sooner than later? It makes me think the world’s too damn cl
ose on me anyway.
“Claire, honey, pour me another glass of tea.”
Claire, the wire child, thin as the poplar on the corner, pale as the birch peeling in the backyard, brings the jug in two hands and smiles at me. The little reddish-brown nodules on her shoulders could be freckles but are not. The flush under Temple’s skin deepens, and her hands start to shake on the glass. She is seeing what I am watching—Claire’s smile and those deadly little warts.
“You know, a lot of famous people died of the lupus. But then people have it for years and never die, or at least don’t die of just that.” She sighs, rolls the ragged ends of her hair between fingers suddenly flushed pink.
“You know what I did?” She looks away, away from me, away from her daughter, away from the dogs who paw restlessly at the bare patches near the trees. “I let them take his body. Told them to go ahead, do anything they had to. When it came down to it, I said, just tell me what it was. The girls, of course, I was thinking of the girls. And they took him, did their stuff to him, things I can’t even imagine. I don’t think, in the end, we buried more than the frame of him.”