Sal began to remove the construction paper from her face. She didn’t try to stop him. The tape made soft sounds as he gently pulled it from her skin, the paper falling in a pile of color at their feet. Once every piece was removed, he held her face, his hand perfectly sized to her cheek as if the make of them individually was had in the creation of them both at the very same time
“I hope you’re infinity, Dresden Delmar.”
She sighed, “You know, I shouldn’t even be talking to you.”
“Because I’m the devil?”
“Because you’re … not white.” She struggled to say that very thing. “Mother says I am to stay away from you. She says my leg makes me prone to trash.”
“I’m trash? But I know Tolstoy and Shakespeare and…” his voice disappeared. A frown on his face as if the air was bad. An incident really, entangling him like wire wrapped around his teeth, back down to his ribs.
“I’m sorry, Sal. I didn’t mean to … it’s just, well, I don’t think you’re trash, but Mother’s Old South, you know?”
“I see.” He smiled for her sake. “If you’re not supposed to be talking to me, then I don’t suppose you’ll dance with me?”
She looked about to burst at that very question. A golden rise about her as if she could already feel herself being spun around, held, waltzed across a ballroom. Then suddenly she lost her smile as she stared at the white roses in front of her.
“Those are Mother’s favorite. But she’s the one who says I can’t dance with a black boy. It serves her right to lose her roses to my dance.”
She grabbed the scissors and without hesitation cut the white roses so quickly and with so much eagerness, she’d be cutting a new one before the old one even had the chance to hit the ground.
Rose by white rose, she taped his dark skin, until he was someone she could dance with. Sal in the white way, but not the right way. And yet it would not lower him, he would not let it. He was going to be dancing with Dresden Delmar, and everything else was outside the heaven of that.
“Fielding?” she called to me. “Would you turn on the boom box? There under the patio table?”
I pulled myself up out of the pool, shaking the water off my hands before lifting the box up on top of the table. I found the local station and turned up the volume. I suppose it could’ve been any song. In memory it is always Alphaville’s witchy ballad of youth. “Forever Young.”
Arms around each other, they placed the trust in their feet as they closed their eyes. Her face tucking into the white roses on his. I watched them until she kissed him. Lips on lips and I dived into the pool, staying under until I thought my lungs would burst into bright, turquoise shards.
When I surfaced, I saw the smashed birthday cake dropped on the concrete by the pool. Red rose frosting and cake as white as the white high heels clanking on that very concrete. Alvernine, come with her green polka-dot dress and its silk that clung to her braless form and her sexy-as-hell curves.
And sexy is what Alvernine was, with her full lips and slim cigarettes. She was a woman known to turn an ashtray into a tool of seduction. Her heavy brow made her eyes seem pillowed in a sort of jungle-cat way. I thought, there is where men go to die. There is where they are devoured by the jaguar.
Though it was from her Dresden got the red hair, Alvernine took to dyeing her own a light strawberry blond, ironing it straight and smooth. And while she was covered in freckles just like Dresden, Alvernine lessened her darker freckles and successfully hid the lighter ones on her face with makeup, which she would also apply to the freckles on her body.
What it must’ve been like to be such a woman’s daughter. No wonder Dresden felt hideous and imperfect in the presence of her mother, who by her own guilt had failed to ever call her daughter beautiful.
As Alvernine stood shaking in fury before Sal and Dresden, I didn’t know what she was more upset about. The cut roses or having caught her daughter dancing with a black boy.
I pulled myself up out of the pool just as she was reaching for Dresden.
“You stay away from her.” Sal raised his fist as if he were willing to use it.
“Don’t you dare try to intimidate me.” Alvernine pointed her finger in his face, her nail perfectly filed and polished in a spectacular red. “I’ve dealt with your kind before, believe me. Now, you get away from my daughter. And you get my roses off of you.”
She ripped the roses, the white petals tossing into the air and falling around them as the closest thing to snow to have ever fallen in the middle of a heat wave.
“Momma, don’t hurt him,” Dresden pleaded, her frightened hand reaching through the falling petals toward her mother.
“This is all your fault.” Alvernine grabbed Dresden’s hand, jerking her. Sal tried to pull Dresden back to him, but Alvernine pushed him away. In the struggle, Alvernine yanked a rose off Dresden’s chest. As she clutched the rose in her hand, she stared at the bruise that’d been revealed on Dresden’s skin.
“What is that?” Alvernine squeezed the rose in her hand until the petals looked like guts oozing between her fingers. “This boy give you that bruise?”
“No, Momma.” Dresden was giving her softest tone. “You did.”
“Nonsense.”
“When you hit me, Momma.” Dresden barely spoke above a whisper, I knew, for her mother’s sake.
“A slap here and there. We all have slaps done to us. I did. Nothin’ to cause a bruise like that. It was this beast. This devil, he’s done this to you.”
“They’re more than slaps you give me, Momma.” Dresden began pulling the roses off herself. “You don’t remember because you drink more than you should.”
As Alvernine stared at the bruises, she dropped the one rose she held. It landed on the ground like a wadded-up tissue. She blinked over and over again. A robot malfunctioning and desperately trying to get her system back to its perfect way.
“You’ve hurt me, Momma. You’ve hurt me and—”
“No.” Alvernine spun around, her hands up to her neck and its choker, like a pearl noose. “I would never hurt you.”
“But you did.” Sal was loud and bold. Unafraid, as she slowly turned to him and his accusation.
When she slapped his cheek, he neither frowned nor retaliated. He merely turned his face up toward hers as if silent hurt was the loudest scream in the world.
She raised her hand again, but Dresden quickly stepped in and took the slap for him.
“You still believe you’ve never hurt me, Momma?”
Alvernine lowered her hand to her stomach like she was sick. She was a woman coming undone, one perfection at a time.
“Come on, Sal.” Dresden grabbed his hand, and together they turned toward the hill behind the house.
“Where are you going?” There was a tinge in Alvernine’s voice. Helpless, frightened even. A hard dose of reality she’d been given. A real bang, and I almost felt sorry for her. “Baby, come back.”
They were running away from her, though Dresden had difficulty with the leg, they were still running faster than Alvernine as she chased, all the while screaming for her baby to come back. Her arms stretched toward them. Her heels something she went down by. Landing on the side of her face. Her lipstick, an awful smear out to her cheek. Her knees two pink things as she rolled onto her back and held herself at the ears, maybe only to check the jewels dangling there.
Her crying had made her mascara look like a whole herd running from her eyes. Rhinoceros wires stretching down her face. Over the blush and freckles, which were small unlit things. Not like the freckles of her daughter. Her daughter who had stopped running when she heard her mother’s falling cry.
Dresden would have returned to her mother, had Sal not gently squeezed her hand and whispered something in her ear. Whatever he said made Dresden turn from her mother.
Alvernine sat up, but did not stand. She merely continued to reach from her fallen spot, crying out to Dresden, to her baby to just come back to her. Dresden
buried her face in Sal’s shoulder.
Having been left behind at the pool, I slowly walked past Alvernine.
“You.” She pointed that perfect nail at me. “I know you. You’re the lawyer’s boy. Your father will hear of this.”
She shook her finger before dropping it back to her trembling lap as I stood over her.
“What?” She sniffled. “What do you want?”
“I just wanna give you a rose, ma’am.”
My hand stung after, but I knew her cheek did even more. I wiped the smears of her mascara and tears from my palm onto my shorts. It felt strange to hit a woman like that, but how can you regret bruising the bully?
I left her there, sobbing into her hands as I ran to catch up to Sal and Dresden, who had stood there watching me slap Alvernine. Sal patted me on the back and said I did a good thing, but as I looked at Dresden, I knew she didn’t think so.
“That was my mother, Fielding.”
“I did it for you. Don’t you know that, Dresden?”
“Yes, I know. But I still wish you hadn’t.”
I think she was about to go to Alvernine, maybe hold her cheek, but she just looked at me and one last time back at her mother, before the three of us ran up the hill.
Together we helped Dresden manage the climb with her leg, and all kept pace until the high land flattened out into a long meadow that we crossed to the dense woods of another hill, which came out on the other side to a fenced pasture belonging to three horses.
There in the pasture, Sal and Dresden removed the last of the roses from each other.
“I like you better without the roses. You know that, don’t you, Sal? That I want you just the way you are.”
He held her cheek, his thumb lightly brushing over her lips as he whispered in her ear, “I’ll be the black boy. You’ll be the white girl. And the world will say no. But we’ll just say yes, and be the only eternity that matters.”
20
Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me Man?
—MILTON, PARADISE LOST 10:743–744
WE STAYED IN that pasture with the horses long after sundown, doing what three people in a horse pasture do, think about what brought them there.
Funny enough, I thought of Elohim. I suppose because of the night sky above me, so like the one I had lain with him under the previous summer. We were there on his roof ending the day of work, which had been removing the nests of chimney swifts in his stacks.
All day long, the swifts circled us as we used long poles to scrape out and dismantle their nests of twigs and saliva. Some of the birds swooped down upon us. They were more aggressive than usual, and when we pulled out the last nest, we saw why.
“We could fry ’em.” Elohim held up one of the five small eggs.
“But I thought you were the type of vegetarian that don’t eat eggs.”
He met my eyes for just a moment. “I didn’t mean me specifically. I meant you.”
I looked up at the swifts anxiously circling above. “But … the eggs are their babies.”
He sighed as he looked up too. “I gather you won’t be eatin’ ’em then?” He laid the egg he held back down into the nest with the other four before gently picking the whole nest up. “You’re too sensitive, boy.”
He tossed the nest off the roof, the eggs coming out in the fall to hit the ground before the lighter nest of twigs. They broke on impact, their yolks spilling out like yellow blood.
“Why’d you do that?” I watched the swifts coming down to land on the branches of the tree overlooking the fallen nest.
“You said you weren’t gonna eat ’em. And I couldn’t have, so there was no other choice but to break ’em open. What’d ya think I was gonna do? Give ’em back to ’em?”
He threw his arms up toward the swifts, a few of which had flown down from the branches to inspect the nest and eggs as if there were some sort of saving to be had.
“It would’ve just been more good-for-nothin’ birds, cloggin’ up my chimneys and bein’ a pain in my ass, Fielding. Now, come on, help me finish this up.”
We continued on in silence, fitting metal screens over the top of each of his chimneys to keep the swifts from building any future nests. By the time we finished cleaning and screening, it was evening.
“Take in the stars with me.” He lay down on the roof and patted the shingles beside him. “You’re not still angry about earlier, are you? They were just eggs, Fielding. Like the ones your momma fries come breakfast.”
As I lay down beside him, he grabbed his pack of cigarettes from the toolbox. I didn’t know him to smoke often, but he was on his third cigarette by the time he spoke again.
“You know why I love the sky, Fielding? Because it makes everyone short. There ain’t a man tall enough to ever look down on the sky. The sky makes everyone look up, and in that, it makes everyone me.”
“Do ya ever wish you were taller, Mr. Elohim?” It was one of those things you ask without thinking. I hadn’t meant to be cruel, but when I looked over at him and saw the tear already halfway down his cheek, I knew I had nudged old shadows.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Elohim. I didn’t mean—”
“My father was a tall man,” he interrupted my apology, never taking his eyes off the sky above him. “My mother was a tall woman. By measurement alone, they were greatly disappointed in me. They were not people who were well prepared to be disappointed, as they so often weren’t in their comfortable lives. They didn’t much know what to do with it, with me, this letdown and disruption to their comfort.
“They weren’t vicious parents, they never screamed in my face that I had failed them in my inability to grow beyond the height of the common armchair. They never struck me, tryin’ to get me to swell taller, one bruise at a time. No, they were not violent. And yet, I don’t remember my mother ever lookin’ at me.
“I like to think she at least did every once in a while when I was still in the cradle, but when I was old enough to recognize whether someone saw me or whether they didn’t, I realized she never did. She would speak to me, of course, she was present in my life. I don’t want it ever said she was cruel or bad tempered or absent. She was there, she was always there in her absolute lady way. She just never looked at me.
“When she would speak to me, she would do so by lookin’ at the things ’round me, but only the short things like the table lamp, the silverware, the string on the shade. It was as if she looked at those short things, she could at least say, my son is taller than that there lamp, that there spoon, than that there four-inch string. There must’ve been comfort in that.
“As for my father, he only ever spent time with me at night and only in the dark woods. He would say it was to collect fireflies, but I knew the real reason was ’cause my father couldn’t bear to be in a room where the light reminded him of his midget son. He had to escape to the dark woods, where in the absence of light I could be as tall as he ever imagined me to be. I was six foot, I was seven foot—hell, I was thirty feet tall, a giant in them woods at night with my father.
“Most people are afraid of the dark, but the dark was the only time I ever heard my father laughin’. There he’d be, my tall, banker father rollin’ up his sleeves, and gallopin’ through the woods, giddy as a hoodlum, chasin’ after the fireflies, all the while yellin’, ‘I can’t see ya, Grayson. It’s so dark. I can’t see you, son.’
“You had never heard a father exclaim he couldn’t see his son the way my father did with such joy.”
Elohim himself laughed. He tried to anyways, but the grief gave it a certain defeat.
“I’d say, ‘I’m over here, Father.’ And he’d tilt his head in my direction, but never down, he never looked down at me in those woods, because in there, I was the son he could look up to. The dark allowed him that. I allowed him that, as I’d stay hidden as best I could as he looked up toward the stars. ‘I see you now, son,’ he’d say. But of course, he was just like my mother, and never saw me after all, n
ot for a damn second.
“You can imagine anything you want in the dark. You can imagine your father loves you, you can imagine your mother is not disappointed, you can imagine that you are … significant. That you mean somethin’ to someone. That’s all I’ve ever wanted, Fielding. To matter. That is all I’ve ever wanted.”
Later, after we climbed down from the roof, Elohim went into the house, he said to get something. While I waited in the yard, I listened to the clanking sounds of the train hauling gravel from the quarry miles away.
I leaned against a tree, my hands in my pockets, my head back on the bark, listening to the clanking until it faded and the night was back to its bullfrog and cricket song. When I turned my head off to the side toward the porch, there he stood, watching me. For how long?
“Mr. Elohim?”
“I always wanted to be a father myself.” His voice was soft like the moths chattering around the light above him. As he came down from the porch, I saw he had two jam jars in his hands. “I’d be damn lucky to have a son like you, Fielding.”
Mostly because I didn’t know what to say, I asked about the jars.
“These are bona fide firefly jars.” He offered me one. “You up for catchin’ some fireflies, son?”
It was the first time he had ever called me son, and I let him do it again in the woods as we ran between the trees, laughing and scooping the fireflies up in the jars, using our hands as the lids we would later open together, releasing that which we had caught for that one brief moment in time.
“Fielding?”
I turned to Sal’s voice. He was propped up on his elbow, looking over at me.
“We said your name a billion times.” Dresden raised up beside him. “What were you thinking about?”
“Nothin’.” I sat up.
They glanced at each other, lying back down while I stayed sitting, looking up at the sky and listening as Sal wished Dresden a happy birthday.
“How old are you?”
“Thirteen. For the first time.” She sighed.
He kissed her forehead before standing up.
The Summer That Melted Everything Page 22
