by Lee Smith
As she would rather forget the time she found that tool—what do you call it? The long thin kind you use to open your car door when you’ve locked your keys inside. But as Gloria told Ms. Ferebee-Bunch, she just didn’t think anything about it at the time. She was much more surprised at finding Buddy home in the middle of the day with two older boys—in her own apartment, when she thought he was in school! And she was much more upset about these friends of Buddy’s than about whatever they might have brought along with them. A Negro might have anything, it’s no way to tell what one might bring into your home.
Gloria said all this to Ms. Ferebee-Bunch, who did not bat an eye. She just looked at Gloria, cold as ice. Maybe Ms. Ferebee-Bunch has some Negro blood herself, a little touch of it like Dinah Shore, because she is the one that recommended for Buddy to go to the group home.
It’s dark now. The neon lights have come on in the Nu-Tread tire sign. The André’s all gone. Gloria sits up and stares at the index card.
She needs to go on out to the Safeway before it closes, but she needs to be here to answer the phone. Also, she needs to cash a check, this is another problem. She can’t think what to do. Plus that new man in the apartment upstairs has got the flu, so she was going to get him something good to eat when she went out, maybe a Sara Lee coffee cake. Everybody likes Sara Lee. Suddenly the phone shrills out. It sounds so loud in this silent apartment. It startles Gloria so much that she knocks the receiver off the couch, trying to answer it.
“Hello?” she says. “Hello?” But all she hears is breathing, then a click on the end of the line. The receiver buzzes in her hand. Wrong number. Carefully she replaces it and settles back on the couch. It’ll ring again in a minute. It’ll be Buddy. He’ll need some food, he’ll want some money. And now, all of a sudden, Gloria knows what she’ll say. Ms. Ferebee-Bunch can go to hell. Sure, honey, she’ll say. Yes. Come on home. Gloria remembers the time when Buddy was a Wise Man in the kindergarten play. She dressed him up in a blue plaid robe, but the kindergarten teacher made him wear a plain navy robe, somebody else’s, instead. They didn’t have plaid in Jesus’ time, the teacher said. It’s going to ring any minute now. It’ll be Buddy. He’s a good boy. He will go to college, he will be a big shot, he will take such good care of his mother. The phone on Gloria’s stomach rises and falls with her breath.
Life on the Moon
For Susan Raines
This story starts at the National Air and Space Museum in our nation’s capital, with me and Lucie taking the Beginner Space Quiz and Richie and Tommy (her little boy) running wild all over the place while Darnell held on tight to my hand. I guess I ought to say something about the Air and Space Museum, I don’t know if you’ve been there or not. It is a huge beautiful building all glass and concrete, with real planes hanging from its high ceiling and rockets and things all over the place. Then you can go in any of the exhibits and learn about something in particular—hot-air balloons, World War I, you name it. Wilbur and Orville Wright’s plane, the first one, hangs right up at the front where you go in, and it is so tiny you can’t imagine how it ever got off of the ground. It’s the littlest thing in the whole museum. But anyway this museum is like the biggest room you ever saw, full of color and noise and flight. It made Richie and Tommy crazy like they wanted to fly themselves, they wouldn’t stay with us or watch any of those programs all the way through. “Let them go,” Lucie said, which I did because there wasn’t anything else to do, no point to try to keep them if they wouldn’t stay.
Now this museum had another effect on Darnell, more like it had on me. It made her hunch her shoulders and press real hard against my side. And me? It made me want to shrink too, pull in my feet and arms for fear they would touch something foreign and cold and made of some material you never would find on this earth, something slimy you didn’t know what it was. At the same time it made my head sort of float up off of my body—the way I get in malls ever since Lonnie left me—like I was talking and hearing myself talk at the same time, or walking and watching myself walk, or taking the Space Quiz with Lucie and watching myself do it while I did.
First thing we did was press the button that said MINIMUM DIFFICULTY.
The square green letters came out on the screen like on a computer.
WHAT PLANET, they read, MOST CLOSELY RESEMBLES THE EARTH?
“Venus,” Lucie said right away.
CORRECT, the machine spelled out. NUMBER TWO. WHAT PLANET IS FARTHEST FROM THE SUN?
“Mama, I have to go to the bathroom.” Darnell pulled at my hand.
“Mercury,” I said, but we missed whether that was right or not because Richie and Tommy came up right then with their faces looking like Christmas, to tell us that the Lunar Module was at the other end of the building, the real thing, they said, and we had to come right away.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” Darnell said again, but Richie punched her.
“Listen,” he said. “The astronauts peed in their suits.”
“You quit that,” I told Richie from my mouth which floated away up high in my face above us all. I could look down and see us and see all the tourists from foreign lands.
WHAT PLANET IS CHARACTERIZED BY RINGS? the machine spelled out, and Richie and Tommy together hollered out, “Saturn!”
Darnell was crying.
“Come on, then,” Lucie said.
She moved off easily through the saris, the backpacks and blue jeans and car coats, looking like a foreigner herself with her jeans and those running shoes. I think you should dress for a trip myself, but I have to say that by then my feet were hurting from my heels.
After the bathroom, where we had to stand in line with French people and I had to put toilet paper all around the seat for Darnell, you can’t be too careful, we finally made it to the other end of the museum, where Lucie stood reading the sign by the Lunar Module and Richie and Tommy jumped all around.
Lucie turned her face to me then, that same dark quick fairy-tale face she had as a little child, and took my hand.
“Oh, June,” she said. “Oh, June, don’t you remember? Oh, June, aren’t you glad you came?”
* * *
Well, I was. I still am. But it was a bigger trip than you can imagine by a long shot.
When Lonnie left me, all I did for two weeks was throw up and cry. Oh, I was plenty mad too. Everything that happened made me sick or mad or sometimes all of it, like when I went down to the mall to get some panty hose at Belk’s and when they were out of my size I had to get a paper bag from the salesgirl and breathe in it right there in the middle of the hosiery department to keep from passing out. Then I went into the ladies’ and threw up. Another time I was walking through the Montgomery Ward TV section, about two hundred of those TVs were on and there was a bowl game with Bear Bryant in full color on every one, wearing his hat. Lonnie loved TV football, he loved the Bear. I used to get mad at him for watching and try to make him look at educational things on Channel 6. I wanted to expand his horizons, as Lucie said when she ran off with the disc jockey. But Lord, it made me cry, I had to tear out of Montgomery Ward and over to The Green Thumb and hide behind the ferns to collect myself. I lost eleven pounds the first two weeks.
Meanwhile Richie and Darnell were shooting down spaceships on the Atari that Lonnie had given them for Christmas, shooting down ship after ship. Lonnie just spoiled them to death, he always did, gave them everything they wanted and then some. They did that for one week solid, while they were out of school for Christmas; then they started skating their new skateboards straight through the family room, where Lonnie had taken the rug and the E-Z Boy recliner, and I never said one word. This was not like me, you can be sure. It’s not the way I am about a house.
Lonnie took the rug and the E-Z Boy and his clothes and six pieces of Tupperware, that’s all, and moved in with a nurse from the hospital, Sharon Ledbetter, into her one-bedroom apartment at Colony Courts. He met he
r at the hospital, I found out later, last year when Richie had his tonsils out. So I guess it had gone on since then, and I never knew a thing.
Sharon Ledbetter is twenty-three years old. It is trite, I thought of saying, but Lonnie would not have even known what that meant, so why bother? Why bother? I asked myself. You can subscribe to the National Geographic for ten years straight, but there are some people who won’t do a thing except look at the naked pictures.
Richie and Darnell went over to visit the apartment at Colony Courts and came back saying that Sharon Ledbetter had a cat named Ms. Pacman and a whole lot of terrific rock albums which she was going to tape for them. They had a real good time. Now right after this was when my first cousin Lucie called from Alexandria where she lives and said why didn’t I and the children come up to Washington and sightsee, it would be good for all of us to get away. She knew what a hard time I was having, Lucie said.
“Thanks but no thanks,” I told her. “I’m too busy trying to put my life in order again,” I said, and Lucie said she knew I was good at that, she wished me the best, but I ought to remember that sometimes it just isn’t possible to do it right away. At this point I started to cry. I have never approved of Lucie and the way she left her own little boy down here with her mama to raise, in fact for years Lucie has made me real nervous.
“Come on, Mama, let’s go to Washington,” Richie said. Richie is always right there at your elbow when you think he’s not, he never misses a trick. He’s a redhead like his daddy, into something every minute of the day.
“I want to go to Washington,” Darnell whined. She says everything Richie does. “Come on, Mama, we never go anywhere.”
“Sharon has a sky-blue LTD,” Richie said, “with a tape deck.”
“Lucie,” I said into the phone, “thank you so much for asking, I really can’t tell you how much I appreciate it, but I just have too much to contend with here. Why, there’s not even a recliner in the family room. I have so much to do, and the children of course are in school.”
“Well, just take them out for a couple of days.” This is exactly the kind of thing you’d expect Lucie to say.
“Children need a routine,” I told her, “and thank you so much for calling.”
“But how are you?” Lucie simply refused to get off the phone. Her voice, sweet and serious, came clear as a bell across West Virginia and down through all these years. “Listen, June,” she said, “you need to think of yourself now, you need to do something for you.”
“Lucie,” I said, “I’m just fine.”
Then I hung up and went in the bathroom to vomit.
When I came out, Richie had busted one of the joysticks on the Atari and Darnell had gone to her room to cry. I looked down at the list in my hand.
Every day of my life I have made a list, and every day I do everything on it. I looked down at the list and I looked around the family room, which echoed with Atari beeps and Darnell crying. I knew I ought to go in her room and hug her but I just didn’t have it in me at that time, I knew I’d start crying myself. Pick up cleaning, the list said. This cleaning had been at Billy’s Martinizing for three weeks by then, ever since Lonnie left.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” I told the kids, and I went out and got in the car. We have a new car and a new house—we hadn’t been in the house five months when all of this happened. “I can’t stay here,” Lonnie said, and then he left. He said he was real sorry. “Real sorry, ha!” I said. But I do have to say he never wanted to build the house in the first place, he wouldn’t take a bit of interest. They would have put cheaper tile in the downstairs bathroom and charged us the same, for instance, if I hadn’t been right there. So now the house was built and still so new that the red dirt showed in patches through the new grass all over the yard, and the patio wasn’t even poured yet, just blocked out with two-by-fours, and Lonnie was over in the Colony Courts Apartments with Sharon Ledbetter, who nobody nice in this town had ever heard of, listening to rock records.
“I’ll just pick up the cleaning,” I said to myself, but when I got down to Billy’s Martinizing, I could hardly get out of the car.
“Cleaning for Lonnie Russell,” I said to the girl behind the counter. She had bright green eyelids, sitting there reading a magazine.
“Lonnie Russell,” I said louder, and then she stood up and walked over and pressed the button which made all the clothes on the line go around and around.
“Ticket?” she said, and when I said “What?”—I couldn’t hear her over the sound of that machine, the clothes went around and around—she said “Ticket” again.
I went through everything in my billfold, then everything in my purse. I make them, needlepoint purses, which everyone loves.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t find it.” This was not like me to lose the ticket. I started to cry.
“Now that’s all right, honey, we’ll find those clothes,” the girl said, looking scared, batting her bright green eyelids at me. “Don’t you worry, Mrs. Russell,” she said, and I guess she must have pushed a button or something because here came Billy of Billy’s Martinizing himself, out of his office and over to me. You should see Billy—he is real fat and wears a blond toupee which comes right down to his eyebrows and open-neck shirts with gold chains.
“What seems to be the trouble here?” he said. He has a voice with oil in it.
“Why, just nothing at all,” I said. I was crying, and the clothes went around and around, but then the girl found the cleaning and stopped the machine. It was a lot of cleaning, thirty-four dollars to be exact, and half of it Lonnie’s. I saw his tan corduroy jacket and his good blue suit he bought in Charleston, all wrapped up nice in the cellophane beside my red wool dress.
“Now now,” Billy said.
“Listen,” I said. “My husband has left me and I am not about to pay for his cleaning.”
The girl backed all the way to the office door and disappeared.
“Why, of course not,” Billy said. His voice just ran all over me. “Why, I wouldn’t think of such a thing,” he said, and he ripped off the cellophane and started separating the clothes. He acted like all of this was exactly nothing, like it happened every day.
Lonnie’s gray jacket on the right hook, my car coat on the left. I couldn’t even see.
“I don’t think I can stand it,” I said.
“There now,” said Billy, who wore a big diamond ring on his right hand. “That’ll be eighteen seventy-five.”
I wrote the check and crossed Cleaning off my list and just stood there because I had crossed off everything on my list for that day, cleaning was the last thing.
“I can’t think what to do next,” I said.
Billy cleared his throat. “Well, Mrs. Russell,” he said, “how about a beer?”
He looked me up and down, I used to be Miss Welch High. His toupee had slid down lower over his eyes and I could see where the little hairs were stitched together in the part. “No, thanks,” I finally said, but it was all I could do to get my cleaning out to the car, where I started hyper-ventilating like crazy the minute I got inside.
A beer! I drove home and went into Darnell’s room and gave her a big, big kiss. “Get up,” I said. “We’re going to Pizza Hut,” and when the kids got all excited I said, “and we’re going to Washington too. Next weekend we’re really going.”
“Who’s going to drive?” Richie had a point, since Lonnie always drove on trips.
I hadn’t thought of that.
“I guess I am,” I said, and so we went.
* * *
I’ll get to the Moon Landing in a minute, but Lucie and I we go way back beyond that. After Daddy got killed in the wreck, Mama and I moved over here to Welch, West Virginia, to be near her sister—that’s Lucie’s mother, my Aunt Adele—since Mama had asthma, and me to raise. “Now this is home, June,” I recall Mama said when she
opened the screen door. “We’re going to stay here.” This made me so happy. Our house was nothing much—a five-room green house with a porch that had coal dust all over it and a fat-bellied wood stove standing up like a little man in the front room, for heat. All the other houses in that holler were just like ours—they used to be company houses before the company mined out the coal and moved onto the other side of the mountain.
But I loved that house, because Mama had said we would stay there. And I loved the mountains too—they rose all around our holler, straight up and rocky and too rough for roads or settling, closing us in. Lucie hated them. But she had a nice brick house in the bottom about a mile from where we were, with a grass yard and a patio, as well as everything else I wanted in the world—a fat father with glasses who ran the Rexall drugstore and wore a red bow tie, two cute little baby brothers to play with, a cocker spaniel, air-conditioning, patent-leather shoes for Easter, a transistor radio when they first came out. Still, we were best friends. We spent all day together every day and saw every movie that came to town at least five or six times. Some of those scenes are burned forever in my mind, like the funeral in Imitation of Life. Lord, how we cried. We were so close in those days that sometimes I’d be thinking something and Lucie would say it out loud. I don’t know what it was that turned her different unless maybe it was the heredity from her mother, my Aunt Adele.
Aunt Adele was as different from Mama as night and day. Aunt Adele taught piano and had pretensions, Lord knows where she got them. When we ate over at my house, for instance, you knew what you’d have—meat and potatoes, green beans in summer, and big red slices of the tomatoes that Mama grew in her garden right by the back door. But when we ate at Lucie’s house it was no telling. You might get chicken cacciatore, for instance, or even pizza, which Lucie’s family found out about when they took the trip to Myrtle Beach, or rare meat. The first time Aunt Adele served it to me it was a Sunday dinner and the preacher was there, I remember I felt my face go hot I was so embarrassed for her to serve something to the preacher not halfway cooked. But Uncle Earl beamed. “Darling,” he said, “that’s lovely,” and all of us ate it like that and I never said a word. Lucie’s daddy sent Aunt Adele a dozen yellow roses for her anniversary, her birthday, Christmas and Valentine’s Day, any excuse you can think of. He was just crazy about Aunt Adele.
