by Lee Smith
Stevie and Mama
Roxy pushes the buttons that roll all the windows down as she drives across the long bridge to Amelia Island. It’s dead low tide. On either side of the bridge, mud flats stretch out for miles, broken up by glistening streams of water winding through patches of tall green grass. Roxy pulls the rubber band off her ponytail and lets her hair blow back in the rush of funky, fishy air. She puts her cigarette out and breathes in deeply. No other air, anyplace else in the world, smells anything like this. March — it’s already the first of March. It’s been way, way too long. Roxy follows A1A through Yulee past the tourist places selling pecans and gator heads and Indian River oranges, noticing the fancy new sign at the right turn down to the southern point where the Ritz-Carlton is. That is not their end of the island, hers and Willie’s.
Roxy turns left toward Fernandina Beach, which still looks mostly like it did back when they bought the beach house years ago with that little windfall they got when his mother died. Miss Rowena! Lord. First Roxy thought Miss Rowena would never die. Then she thought she would never get over it. They bought the house for thirty thousand dollars cash, can you believe that? Now the land alone is probably worth five times this much. Roxy drives past the old amusement park, now closed. Not only closed but condemned, she hates this. She and Willie used to neck on the Ferris wheel, way up high. From the top, you could see all the way across the island. But now teardowns are starting, even on their own sandy street. That little yellow house on the corner where the Cardinales used to live is totally gone, as if it had never existed. A brand-new house is already framed up, under construction in its place. Roxy remembers back when Lou Cardinale built that tiki bar out back, he used to be so proud of his mai tais, but they were way too sweet. Soon, Fernandina Beach won’t even exist anymore, not this Fernandina Beach, not theirs. The kids have been calling it a time warp for years.
Roxy pulls into their driveway which is almost covered by the winter’s blowing sand, as usual. She’ll have to get out here and sweep like hell. Somehow she is always surprised to find the cottage still here. When she doesn’t see it for a while, she starts thinking maybe she just dreamed it up. She feels like that about Willie too. She forgets what he looks like whenever he’s away — she still can’t believe she ever met him, she still can’t believe he’s hers, even after all these years. Lord! Where did the years go, anyway? The little ramshackle frame house has been added on to haphazardly from time to time, a room here, a room there, like a house built by children. The deck sags. It’s still painted white, but peeling, with green woodwork and a Pepto-Bismol pink front door, the same colors it had when they bought it. Willie likes for everything to stay the same.
Roxy takes the door key out from under the rubber mat that says go away!
Their sentiments exactly.
She lets herself in, then goes around raising all the shades. She slides the glass doors open onto the deck and the beach. They’re hard to push on their gritty tracks. A red paper Japanese lantern hangs down low over the big battered oak table, always littered with whatever Willie has found on the beach. Every morning he walks for miles, then makes a different arrangement to amuse her. Often, I love you in shells — oyster shells, mussel shells, shiny coquina shells. Today there’s a funny cat face left over from last fall, with round startled shell eyes, a giant curved rusty nail for a mouth, and seaweed whiskers. The iron smile looks wry and seductive. Roxy remembers sitting at this table herself with Lilah and her little friends, making ballerinas out of pipe cleaners, using those delicate white hinged shells as the skirts. Sometimes they even glued on yarn for hair. Sometimes Willie still quotes that poem he used to say to her, the one about loving all the little things, and that’s still true. He still does. Roxy loves it when Willie says poetry out loud to her, she never heard anybody do this before she met him.
Roxy runs her hand over the pile of starfish and horseshoe crabs on the end of the table. Used to be, she didn’t give a damn about stuff like this. She would have thrown this whole mess in the trash. In a certain way, Willie has given her the natural world, as he has given her a stepdaughter, Lilah, the joy of their hearts. Pictures of Lilah are everywhere. Roxy believes in lots of pictures, though she has taken down almost all the photographs of little Alice now. Todd and Seth, her sons by her first marriage, are everywhere too: nice-looking boys, nice-looking men. She got their names from TV, to give them a good start in life, a plan that has clearly worked.
Willie likes to say that Roxy saved him, which is not true. It’s more true that he saved her, from a regular comfortable life of schedules and dinner parties and country clubs. Not that there is anything wrong with such a life. But if she had met Willie first, it would have been another story. She didn’t, though.
Willie is the love of her life. And actually, she met himtwice.
THE FIRST TIME, Roxy was married to the father of her sons, a law student named Livingston Lovett Carter the Fourth, like a king of England. “But what do people call him?” Roxy’s sister, Frances, had asked, wrinkling her nose, when Roxy took him up home. Roxy just looked at her. “They call him Livingston,” she said. This should have been a warning, but it wasn’t.
Roxy was crazy about Livingston from the first time she saw him at a wedding reception at the country club in Athens, Georgia, where she worked sometimes catering parties, one of three part-time jobs she took on during her sophomore year to supplement her scholarship. Frances kept telling her that she ought to just bag it and come back home and take classes at the community college like everybody else, and Roxy knew that made good sense, but she just loved Athens. She felt like herself in Athens, some way, which she never had back home in Rose Hill where she’d felt like an impostor in her own family all along. She knew this was crazy, but it was true. She could be Roxy in Athens but she was still Shelby Roxanne back in Rose Hill where she had been everything: a cheerleader, the vice president of the Beta Club, a star in all the plays.
She had even been crowned Miss Rose Hill in a pageant, reciting a poem she had written herself as her talent. That poem has been lost for years now. As Miss Rose Hill, Shelby Roxanne won a set of white Samsonite luggage and a steam iron, gifts which seemed to carry opposing messages: stay home and get married and iron your brains out, versus travel. She had picked travel, over everyone’s objections, accepting the scholarship in Athens. Her family was a close family, nobody had ever left the county. Roxy’s mother was one of the very few outsiders; she had come there to teach home economics in the high school, and fallen in love with Roxy’s dad, and then she never left either.
Roxy’s mother had made her and her sisters join the 4-H Club against their wishes, but then Roxy loved it, she loved to go off to 4-H conventions and contests in other towns, and to 4-H camp in Homosassee, Florida, where she got a new and better boyfriend every year. She loved the home demonstration part of 4-H, where you got to stand up in front of the judge and make a speech about whatever you were demonstrating, it was just exactly like being in a play. When she was a junior, Shelby Roxanne developed her own recipe for potato salad (her secret: the dressing was half French, half mayonnaise, so the potato salad was sort of pink). She learned all about the nutrient values of the potato and the history of the potato, including the Irish potato famine. She delivered her potato salad speech wearing a red and white checked blouse and a blue denim skirt, made by her mother and designed to look both patriotic and country at the same time (this was Shelby Roxanne’s own idea). She was the cutest girl in the contest. Her potato salad, prepared ahead of time and tasted by the judges, was good too. In fact, it was delicious. She won at the local level, then went on to the state contest in Atlanta where she lost in the finals because she didn’t wear a hairnet.
But she got her picture in the Rose Hill Record wearing her potato outfit anyway, along with a “little write-up” as her aunt Suetta always called it. Her aunt Suetta was making a scrapbook about her. Everything she did went into this scrapbook — every program from the tim
es she sang in church, every play she ever starred in, the invitation to her high school graduation, the announcement of her scholarship to the university. The summer before she left, Shelby Roxanne and Frances and their first cousin, Darlene, got up a little trio named the Gospel Girls and sang at revivals and church homecomings all over their area, chauffeured by Aunt Suetta.
Later, in Athens, Roxy sang with a rock group named Steel Wool and slept with the bass player, named Skye Westbrooke. Skye thought the potato salad story was a riot, he was always getting her to tell it to his friends. At first Roxy enjoyed doing this, she enjoyed the big laugh she got every time, but after a while, she began to feel disloyal to somebody . . . her family? Or maybe her old self, that good, sweet Shelby Roxanne? She wasn’t exactly sure. So she quit, she refused to tell the potato story anymore, and she and the bass player had a fight, and that’s when she met Livingston at that wedding reception at the Athens country club in 1965, wearing the little black skirt and white blouse of caterers everywhere, serving tiny crab cakes on a silver tray.
Or to be exact, when Livingston met her.
Because whatever happened, Livingston took it over. This was his nature. He would make it his thing, and then he would make everything happenhis way, whatever he wanted. It never occurred to him not to do this. And it never occurred to Roxy not to go along with it, either, because whatever Livingston wanted, he wanted in the most intense and focused way imaginable. So of course she was flattered — who wouldn’t be? There is nothing as persuasive as somebody who wants you very, very much.
Livingston was cute, too, in a preppy way, before Roxy had ever heard that word. He had perfect blond hair that fell forward into his eyes just a little bit, and loafers with no socks (“Where are his socks?” Frances asked). He wore knit shirts with the collars turned up, which looked stupid in Roxy’s opinion, though she held her tongue. She would hold her tongue for years and years, about everything.
Now she is ashamed of this. But she felt guilty because she got pregnant. The modest wedding reception was held at that same Athens country club, paid for by Livingston’s mother and father who actually turned out to have a lot less money than a person might have supposed. Mostly what they had was a sense of style, like Livingston. They had expected him to marry money, and were disappointed when he didn’t. They were disappointed by the circumstances, as well. So it was Roxy’s own idea to invite only her own immediate family to the wedding, not all those tacky cousins from up in the hollers.
“Listen,” Frances whispered fiercely in the moment just before Roxy and their dad started down the aisle, “Don’t do it. Just don’t do it. This is not the love of your life.” Frances herself was holding out for Mr. Right. But Roxy did it anyway. It was also her own idea to drop out of college and start working a series of jobs to put Livingston through law school, where he was fast becoming a star: editor of the Law Review, Order of the Coif. He studied all the time. He was there, but not there. Of course she was very proud of him.
Roxy put the baby, Todd, in day care and worked as the receptionist at an insurance office, then as the manager at a swim club, and then she sold ads for the newspaper. Meanwhile her own degree hung out there in the future like a sign on an inn, lit up in the foggy night someplace on the other side of town. She always thought she’d finish it, but she never did. She was so good at jobs, so good with people. Everybody liked her. After Seth was born, Roxy stayed home and started selling Mary Kay cosmetics at night, at Mary Kay parties in people’s homes. Soon she was a Ruby, then a Double Ruby, then a Diamond, then a Double Diamond, moving right up the Mary Kay pyramid. She was about to earn a pink Cadillac. Roxy was making a small fortune selling Mary Kay when she found out that both her mother-in-law and the dean’s wife were scandalized by this career, that Mary Kay was considered somehow low class. It “would not do” for a lawyer’s wife to drive a pink Cadillac. So Roxy switched to real estate when Livingston finally graduated and got a job clerking for the federal judge in Macon. Real estate gave her more flexible hours for the little boys, anyway, and this is how she met Willie the first time, at an open house.
THIS HOUSE HAD BEEN on the market for almost two years because the owners were asking too much for it. It was an ultramodern split-level overlooking Lake Heron, north of town. Everything in it was chrome, beige, or black. Cold. Roxy could see why the people who lived here had split up, she couldn’t have lived in a house like this for five minutes herself. But you couldn’t have guessed this if you had come to the open house that Sunday afternoon, and Roxy had showed you around. The real problem, she soon figured out, was that people old enough to afford this house were put off by the style, and people young enough to appreciate the style didn’t have the money.
The open house had already been going on for two hours when Willie showed up with his wife, Lucinda, who was very tall, very pregnant, and incredibly beautiful. Roxy noticed her right off. You couldn’t help it. Lucinda had enormous blue eyes, like Lake Heron, and waist-length naturally blonde hair, as opposed to Roxy’s own not naturally blonde hair. Lucinda had a Kim Novak nose and a small pretty mouth with perfect white teeth. She wore a glittering lavender top over a flowing patchwork skirt. She was the most beautiful person that Roxy had ever seen in real life, like a movie star, or somebody on television. Maybe this was actually true, because she looked down all the time, like she was afraid of being recognized. Willie was sort of scruffy and nondescript beside his huge beautiful wife, a normal-size red-bearded man who wore a weird medallion on a chain. Willie had long scraggly red hair and an open shirt that showed even more red hair on his chest. Both of them were barefooted. Of course it was the early seventies, but still — this was Georgia, for Pete’s sake!
WILLIE INTRODUCED HIMSELF, then Lucinda, first names only, then went straight over to the refreshment table where he poured himself a plastic cupful of wine right up to the top and drank it all down in one gulp, then another. There was nothing to eat, all the peanuts and Roxy’s homemade cheese straws were long gone. She had already decided that these people couldn’t possibly afford this house when Lucinda went over to Willie and took his hand tentatively and whispered something in his ear. Lucinda moved slowly, like a woman walking through water.
Willie cleared his throat. “I guess we’d like to look at it,” he told Roxy.
“Okay.” She went into her spiel. “There’s a whole master suite upstairs with its own balcony overlooking the lake, and a choice of other rooms for the baby.” Though she couldn’t imagine anybody having a baby in this house — would it have a chrome crib? “And this is a great area for children,” she added. “There’s a Montessori school about a mile up the road.” These people looked like Montessori types to Roxy.
Lucinda gave her a shy half smile, then looked back down. Willie poured himself another cup of wine (“A traveler?” Roxy almost asked him) for the house tour. Upstairs and down they all went, then into the enormous gleaming kitchen where Lucinda barely glanced at the state-of-the-art appliances, clinging to her husband’s hand. Something was wrong with her, Roxy decided. Maybe she was terminally ill like Ali McGraw in Love Story, which had just come out. Or maybe she was on drugs. Actually they both looked like they might be on drugs.
Other visitors stared at them curiously as they came back down the winding staircase, holding hands. Roxy thought Willie and Lucinda would leave then, but they didn’t. Instead, they suddenly turned around at the bottom and went back up the stairs and stood in front of the long window on the landing for half an hour, whispering. Willie kept his arm around his wife and massaged her shoulder the whole time. At one point Roxy started up the stairs to speak to them, then just stopped on a step below, looking up at them from behind. The sun fell through the long window, spinning their hair into gold, as in a fairy tale. He really loves her, she thought.Really really really . Suddenly Roxy felt empty and foolish standing there in her little red suit and patent-leather pumps watching them. She felt hollow and fragile, like a wind chime, a thought so
crazy that she went back downstairs and got a cup full of wine herself despite a frown from Irene Kramer, her more experienced co-worker.
Finally Willie and Lucinda headed back down the stairway like a bridal couple making an entrance. Lucinda was blushing, though she still looked down.
“We’ll take it,” Willie told Roxy when they reached the bottom.
“Don’t you want to look at the lower floor?” she asked. “The basement? There’s a whole guest suite down there, and an office — “
Willie looked at his wife, who shook her head slightly: no.
“That’s okay,” he said.
“Really?” Roxy knew she was being unprofessional, but she couldn’t believe it. And they still hadn’t asked the price.
“We’re sure.” For the first time, Willie smiled directly at her, and then she could see the appeal, all right.
Irene Kramer moved forward like a bitch on wheels. “I’ll be glad to discuss terms with you,” she said. “We can step back here into the study.”
“Oh, we’ll just pay cash,” Willie’s wife spoke for the first time, in a surprising little-girl voice. Then she wrote out a check for ten thousand dollars and handed it to Roxy. “Is that enough for now?” she asked, and Roxy said it was plenty.
They left in an old red convertible with the top down, her yellow hair flying out behind them like a banner in the breeze as Willie gunned it down the long driveway. Willie always drove convertibles, and he always drove too fast. He always cooked on high, too. But Roxy would learn all this much later.
“Well, I swan!” she said, reverting to an old mountain expression of her mother’s, which covered just about everything.
But Irene smiled a practiced, calculating smile that crinkled her makeup. “Music people,” she said. “Wait and see. You run into every damn thing in this business.”
