Al was taking great pains with his roll, using about three times more butter than he really needed. The doorbell rang again, and a voice called out, “Anybody home in there?” The screen door opened, and they heard several loud knocks on the door, followed by two more rings of the doorbell. Al calmly set down his knife, broke off half of his roll, and began to eat it.
“Yoo-hoo!” the voice said. It was a deep phlegmy voice but clearly a woman’s. The doorbell rang again.
“Whoever it is, I don’t think she’s going away,” Celia said.
He shrugged and picked up his fork. “I don’t care if she stands out there all night. I don’t answer the phone or the doorbell during meals.” He took an enormous bite of green beans.
She already knew this, of course. Al allowed nothing to interfere with his eating. She had been sitting right here at this same table only a month ago when an ambulance had pulled into the driveway next door, siren wailing and lights flashing. They had been eating BLTs and cream of broccoli soup that Al had made, but he hadn’t budged from his chair.
When Celia had gone to the door and thrown it open, he hadn’t even looked up from his bowl. She had gone outside to see the next-door neighbor borne out the front door on a stretcher and had learned from his wife that he had fallen off a ladder trying to hang a mirror above the fireplace. By the time Celia had returned to the table, Al had already refilled his soup bowl. Between bites he had nodded toward the house next door and said slurpily, “So what’s going on?”
Finally the doorbell quit ringing, and they heard the slow heavy sound of someone retreating down the front steps. Celia couldn’t help wondering who it was. Probably somebody selling something for a booster club or soliciting donations for cancer research. She picked up her knife to cut a piece of her meat. She had to work at it, and as she did, Al glanced at her and sighed. He was not at all happy about the Steak Charlotta. He started cutting his own meat with exaggerated sawing motions, his lips pressed together tightly.
“How about steak knives?” Celia suggested. “After all, it is steak.”
“The recipe said it would fall apart,” he said testily. “I hate a recipe that raises your hopes like that.”
“It would probably be fine if you could cook it another couple of hours.”
“But we’re eating now,” Al said. “I want it ready right now, not in another couple of hours. I followed every step of the stupid recipe.” It struck Celia with great force that marrying a man like Al would come down to conversations like this one. Their lives would revolve around meals; their moods would be determined by them. She looked at Al and suddenly thought of Mr. Ed, the horse on television reruns, content in his warm stable with plenty of oats and hay. She watched Al stab a bite of his steak and put it into his mouth almost angrily. She had never before noticed the rather horsey way he chewed his food, working his jaws sideways and showing a little too much gum, and without meaning to she laughed right out loud.
Al kept chewing, of course, but frowned at her. “What’s so funny?”
“Oh, nothing really. I just remembered this joke I heard.”
“Oh yeah?” He took a bite of his corn, followed by another one of green beans, then glared distrustfully at Celia. “What joke?”
“This horse goes into a bar and sits down,” Celia said. “The bartender comes over and says, ‘Hey, why the long face?’” She paused, then laughed again and shrugged. “Oh well, it seemed funny at the time.”
Al grunted and continued to chew. A buzzer went off in the kitchen. “That’s the dessert,” he said. He took the rest of his roll with him and left the table again.
From the small dining area where she sat, Celia turned her eyes to Al’s living room, took in the bachelor look of it all—the stacks of magazines and books by the lumpy recliner, the remote control resting on its padded arm, the blue-and-brown plaid sofa, the pale sheers drooping at the large front window, a cheap metal floor lamp with a crooked shade, the bare walls. She shuddered to think of the redecorating a woman would have to do here. Or the decorating—you could hardly call it redecorating when it looked like this.
Of course, in Al’s defense, he hadn’t lived here very long. He had bought the house and moved in only two months ago, after he had decided to keep his job at the bank and stay in the area awhile. Remembering the apartment he had moved from, however, Celia was fairly sure his house was going to look exactly this same way years from now. Al’s domestic interests stopped at cooking.
For a moment she tried to imagine what it would be like to move in here as Mrs. Al Halston, and the thought was so horrible that she actually stuck out her tongue and made a face. She wished more than anything they were done with the meal so she could make her speech to Al, dump his stuff out of her trunk, and get home to her own apartment, full of good furniture and art.
Al came out of the kitchen whistling, which Celia translated as a sign that the dessert had turned out well.
“Save some room for Berry Berry Buckle,” he said, seating himself again and taking up his fork. And though she hadn’t asked, he began explaining the dessert to her. “It’s kind of a cross between a cobbler and a cake,” he said, “and you use three kinds of berries—raspberries, blackberries, and blueberries. I found the recipe in this old book that . . .”
As he talked on, it occurred to Celia that this had become something of a pattern, these pre-breakup dinners. She wondered how many she had sat through by now, picking at her food until enough time had passed and she could spring the news. It always seemed to work out that way, not that she planned it or anything, not as if she thought, Well, I’ll get one more good meal out of him and then split.
She remembered the last guy, Ward, who used to work at the Derby Daily News before he moved over to Greenville to work for a bigger paper. She had first met him when she had gone to the Derby newspaper office to talk to the editor about a freelance article she had agreed to do. Ward had introduced himself as the new sports writer, although she discovered later that most of his work in the office consisted of other things besides covering sports. He took care of the billings, for one, and did obituaries for another, also worked with ads and even cleaned the bathroom in back. Sports writing was his first love, though, and his speech was peppered with sports analogies. In fact, this was the thing about Ward that, like Al’s obsession with food, Celia had grown to detest.
If he was late because he got tied up with a project at work, for example, Ward couldn’t give the real reason. Instead, he’d have to say something like “Wow, it took forever to chip my way out of that bunker” or “Sorry, the game went into overtime.” If he was optimistic about something, he might say, “Hey, first and goal, on the two” or “Green flag and no pit stops.” A tense situation might elicit “Whoa, sudden death shootout.” When Celia had canceled a date one time, he had said, “No problem, we’ll just roll out the tarp and take a rain delay.”
Their last night together had been at a small restaurant trying hard to be trendy in downtown Greenville, a place called Ziggy’s that used to be a shoe repair shop. When she had told him afterward that she didn’t want to see him anymore, he had said, “Ejecting me from the game, huh? Sending me to the old locker room?” She had felt an immense wash of relief at that moment, knowing she wouldn’t have to put up with him anymore. She had taken a deep breath, looked at him without flinching, and said, “Yes, you’ve struck out, double faulted, air balled, gotten sacked, and whatever else you want to call it.”
Usually she would lose all interest in the man long before the final dinner, but at last she would be seized with the knowledge that she couldn’t stand him another day, and she would accept an invitation to go out, knowing it would be the last time. Something always seemed to rip apart and come crashing down at some point in a relationship, like a tree struck by lightning in a sudden storm.
Before Ward there had been what she called her “C Sickness,” a string of guys whose names had started with C. Chris, Clint, Casey, and Colin. Al
l but one had been short relationships, but she had actually begun to think that Casey might be a marriage prospect until she went swimming with him one day. It was sometimes the silliest, smallest things that could trigger the end of a relationship. As she sat beside Casey on the edge of the pool that day, she noticed how white and nearly hairless his thighs were and how fat they looked pressed against the concrete. She had broken up with him a week later after a meal at a steakhouse over in Spartanburg.
Before the “C Sickness” period there was an older guy named Roy she had liked a lot. She had met him at a party, and they had spent three hours by themselves on a balcony talking about books, art, and theater. By the end of the evening she had imagined herself in love, her heart nearly bursting with the sudden influx, but then right before she left the party, she had learned that Roy’s last name was Kluck, and her heart had suddenly sprung a leak and emptied itself.
The trouble with most men, she had decided long ago, was that they were too crass, too driven, too loud, and too full of themselves. They tried too hard to impress her, to make her smile, to prove themselves funny and smart and ambitious. She hated the quick, assessing way they looked at women walking by, top to bottom and back up again.
And they always, always imagined themselves to be great irresistible Casanovas, acting as if they had taken an advanced course in romancing a woman—no, more like they had written the book for the course. Sometimes she would feel like laughing right out loud, and sometimes she actually did, which they always misinterpreted as evidence that she was overcome with delight. The truth was, though she had met a few men she knew she could put up with, she had never met one she knew she couldn’t do without. She was pretty much convinced by now that such a man didn’t exist.
* * *
She had counted up to only the last seven or eight men by the time her dish of Berry Berry Buckle was set before her. One thing Celia liked about eating with Al was that she didn’t have to search for things to talk about because he gave his full attention to his food, either eating it or delivering a monologue about it. This particular meal seemed to be going on forever, though, and Celia was starting to get restless.
The dessert was okay, though nothing to rave about—not as good as a regular cobbler made with only one kind of berry, in Celia’s opinion, except that it was still warm. It did have that going for it. Al had added a scoop of vanilla ice cream to the top, and it was melting fast.
Al was finished with his serving before Celia was half done with hers. He dropped his spoon into his bowl, swiped at his mouth with his paper napkin, and emitted a satisfied sigh. At that exact moment the doorbell rang again.
Though Al didn’t curse nearly as much as a lot of men did, he did so now. “That better not be the same idiot as a while ago,” he said. Celia didn’t reply, but she wondered what difference it made, or how he would find out if it was, or what he would do about it. He pushed back his chair and stalked to the door as if ready to throw the person off the porch bodily.
He jerked the door open and was almost run over as a large woman lumbered across the threshold. “Well, good! Somebody’s home after all! I just knew in my heart somebody was in here, what with the lights on and the cars in the drive and all. It could be your doorbell doesn’t work right. Sometimes ours won’t if you don’t punch the little button right square in the middle. Willard, he’s my son-in-law, he says he’s going to buy us a new one and wire it up hisself so we can have one we can count on. Folks don’t know they got to push it just right, so there’s no telling how many visits we’ve missed on account of them wires not meetin’ up. I keep meaning to write us up a little tag and tape it by the doorbell, one that says Push Hard, but it keeps slipping my mind. But anyway, that’s one reason I like to follow up with a knock or two when I go to somebody’s door and maybe holler out a word of greeting on top of it all. I figure surely they’ll hear at least one of ’em in case they got a faulty mechanism like ours, though I guess you must not of when I came around a little bit ago. Maybe you had your TV up too loud.” She nodded toward Al’s big screen. “They can sure make a racket.” Then laughing, she said, “We don’t have one at our house. We make enough racket by ourselves!”
During this stunning explosion of words, the old woman stood on the brown mat at the door and wiped her feet the whole time, slowly yet thoroughly. She wore black rubber boots, a voluminous gray wool cape, and a dark green scarf cinched about her head. She had to be at least six feet tall, with the heft of a tree trunk. In one hand she carried a plastic grocery bag that bulged with the rounded shapes of whatever was inside.
Celia had a bite of Berry Berry Buckle poised on her spoon but could make no progress toward eating it, so great was her astonishment at the arrival of the visitor. Had she put this woman into a story in her creative writing class, her college professor would have cried, “Hold on! Tone her down!” Compared to a character like her, Celia’s Georgia relatives were only pale shadows. And Al likewise was rendered both motionless and speechless. If someone had broken into the house with an assault rifle and begun spraying them with bullets, they couldn’t have been more incapacitated.
“ . . . over there kitty-cornered in that house with the front door that’s painted red,” the woman was saying now, pointing across the street. “That was the one thing I begged Willard for when we moved here a little over a year ago. ‘Willard,’ I said, ‘I got just one request in all this revampin’ you’re doing, and that is a red door.’ I always did want a house with a red front door, and I never in my whole life had one till now. It’s such a handy way to tell folks where you live, to be able to say, ‘Ours is the house with the red door!’” She paused and looked down at the bottom of her boots before stepping off the mat.
Al was staring at her as if she were a UFO and little Martians were coming out of her mouth.
“Here, mind if I set down just a minute?” the woman said, making for the sofa. “I been out too long, and my old joints is telling me it’s high time to get back home and quit gallivantin’ around the neighborhood in the nippy night air. But I was so hoping you’d be here when I stopped by for one last try—and you are!” She sat down heavily on the sofa, then looked over at Al and repeated, “You must not of heard me when I came by earlier.”
Al closed the door slowly but remained standing near it. The woman set the plastic bag on the sofa beside her and turned to look at Celia, stretching her face into a spectacularly homely grin. “You must be this nice man’s little lady friend,” she said. “What’s your name, honey?”
Al answered for her. “Celia Coleman.”
The woman turned back to Al. “And what’s—”
“Al,” he said. “Al Halston.”
The old woman nodded approvingly. “Celia and Al—them’s nice names.” She pointed back over her shoulder. “I’m Eldeen Rafferty. I live over there on the other side of the street. I been watching you come and go for weeks on end, out the window of our house—that one I was telling you about with the red door—but I couldn’t never seem to get it timed right so’s I could come pay you a visit when the both of you was here. I help baby-sit my little granddaughter, you see. But I do love to visit when I get a minute here and there.”
She picked up the plastic bag beside her. “Well, anyway, here’s the cause for me bustin’ in on you young folks tonight. I brought you these. My daughter Jewel baked us up a double batch of muffins tonight to go with our supper, and I told her, ‘Jewel,’ I said, ‘I’m aimin’ to put some of these in a bag and carry ’em to our neighbor over there in that little white house.’ I was so happy when I saw your car here,” she said to Celia, “’cause I been wantin’ to meet you, too, and see if you was as pretty up close as you was from the window.” She clenched her teeth into another frightful smile. “And you are!” she said. “Here, you can take these.” She extended the bag toward Al, and he stepped over from the door.
“Thanks,” he said. He opened the bag and looked inside.
“I apologize for
not comin’ over sooner,” she continued, “but like I said, I baby-sit my little grandbaby during the day—Rosemary Jean’s her name—and she’s been teething bad, and then she had her a doozy of a ear infection for a spell and has been all fretful and out of sorts from it. So I been sticking close to home ’cause I sure didn’t want to get her out during that awful cold snap we had.”
One quick breath and she plowed ahead. “We moved here to this neighborhood a little over a year ago, and I been working on learning everybody’s name up and down our street. I’m just about done, too, except I never can get that man down there in number 58—you know that house with the fence and the sign that says Beware of Dog—to come to the door.” She lowered her voice and leaned forward. “He’s got him a bad leg, from what I can tell—it might even be one of them wooden legs—and I think he needs him a hearing aid to boot.”
She leaned forward a little more. “And I don’t think he’s got him a dog at all ’cause I sure never seen one or even heard one. I think the sign’s there to discourage burglars and hooligans.” She leaned back. “’Course, maybe he did have a dog and something happened to it. We had us a dog named Hormel that got hisself hit by a car.”
Dispenser of Too Much Information—that’s what Celia called people like this old woman, though she couldn’t remember meeting anyone who fit the label to quite the extent of this woman, who was still talking. “ . . . and I sure miss that little pooch, though I don’t miss all his mischief. Why, he could scoot under the fence and take off faster ’n a jackrabbit, he could! Just had these short little stubs of legs, but, oh, he was a quick little feller. One of them wiener dogs, you know.”
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