Liberating Paris

by Linda Bloodworth Thomason

  He wished that he could put his arms around her, too. Then, she squeezed his hand, even though she knew he couldn’t feel it. This was something no one but Milan ever did and it touched him like nothing else. Suddenly, he felt angry at Wood for not better understanding his wife. This improbable Aphrodite who had emerged from rubble and never seemed to grow old or tired in her quest to be worthy of the rest of them. She didn’t like books and she didn’t think like Wood or write like Jeter. She didn’t have Mavis’s sense of humor or culinary skills, but she felt things on your behalf. And it cost her to do so, too. You only had to look into her eyes to see that.

  She was speaking to him now. “Does it make you sad, you know, to come here?”

  He thought for a minute. “No.” He looked at the stairs that went up to the old apartment where he had once lived with his mother and father. Part of the railing was missing now and the paint was hardly visible.

  “This is the last place I was really alive…. I was coming down those stairs, on my way to the game. I was skipping some of them…and my dad said, ‘Slow down, son, you run too fast.’”

  The others were several blocks away now. The two of them stared at the broken windows a while longer and then Milan whispered, as quiet as the snow, “I love you.”

  He absorbed it like a kiss and then told her with his eyes what he had to leave unsaid.

  By the time they caught up with everyone else, Elizabeth was out in the middle of the street, performing a short, dramatic plié. Then she lay down in the snow on her back. Elizabeth always liked to lie down where you usually couldn’t—once even in the middle of an interstate for a full minute. Now Luke came and tried to pull her up but instead she yanked him into the snow with her, laughing. He then rubbed a handful of it into her hair and Charlie somehow became involved and finally almost everyone was throwing snowballs at everyone else until Wood’s hit Duff in the head and shrieking, she impulsively stuffed some loose snow down the front of Wood’s shirt—and suddenly everything stopped. Like at a dinner party when everyone has been laughing and then someone says completely the wrong thing and no winning comment or clever gesture can clean it up. The moment must simply be endured and then moved away from. That’s what happened as they were standing near Doe’s and finally someone got the idea that they should all go inside, which they did. Mavis made everyone some splendid cappuccinos—except for Brundidge, who was opposed to cappuccinos—and Charlie wolfed down a plateful of Mavis’s buttermilk cinnamon rolls, while Duff went on and on, still trying to make up for the shirt, about how she just couldn’t get over that Main Street was now mostly gone.

  Then it was Luke, who was curious about what things used to be like here. And somehow that led back to high school and Wood telling how Milan would come high-stepping down this street, wearing her drum majorette’s enormous fur hat and punctuating the air with her golden four-foot baton, and, Wood swore, kicking her white patent leather boots about a foot over her head. Just hearing this made Milan’s face hot with pride. It was true. For her, each step and every swift exhilarating kick had been a blow for her family, like when an upturned fist is thrust toward heaven on behalf of something or someone finally on the rise. Everyone was laughing now and for a few seconds it seemed to Milan that Wood had almost forgotten he wasn’t in love with her anymore, at least not the way he used to be—and that he had told the story without thinking and then remembered that his emotions were no longer in it. Then Luke wanted to know what his mother had been like and no one knew what to say. With Milan present, every story seemed an unsure bet. Duff put Luke off, claiming to have just been an ordinary girl, but the way she looked down after she said this and waited, well, it was clear she wanted someone to say more. So Wood, who hadn’t wanted to say anything, stepped in.

  “Well, Luke, I can tell you this. I remember how the English teachers were having trouble getting some of the jocks to take poetry. But once your mother signed up, well, they had to bring in extra chairs from the cafeteria.” Then there was a lull, making him finish with, “So, I guess you could say, she was the girl who put boys in mind of poetry.”

  Duff buried her face in Wood’s sleeve and held his arm with both hands.

  “Oh, Wood, that isn’t true. I don’t remember that.”

  Milan had wanted to speak up and say, I worked in the principal’s office and I don’t remember that either. I think my husband is completely full of crap. And if this little sideshow gets any friendlier then I’ll just be telling your son that what I remember you wrote stupid poems about living in shadows and you constantly sat around on your lazy ass in PE and told the senile gym teacher that you were having your period, which apparently went on for three weeks out of every month. You bled more than Alexis, the hemophiliac son of Nicholas and Alexandra (Milan loved royal history), while everyone else ran a hundred laps and cleaned the showers. And how you were the rudest person I have ever known, always eating off other people’s plates and putting your big, stupid feet in their laps. And how you were so insipid (this from the Reader’s Digest vocabulary quiz) that you took your own name off the homecoming ballot and how I whipped your spoiled, pseudo (another quiz, don’t pronounce the P) hippie butt and became the queen myself! How about we tell him that story, Miss I Stand Tall Against Piggly Wiggly Oppression (not from a quiz, but life experience).

  This was what she wanted to say but would not, because she felt she had already revealed more of herself than she cared to when she said grace.

  Suddenly Milan’s head was starting to hurt. Next to her, Elizabeth was asking, “Do you really like him, Mother?”

  “What?”

  “Do you really like Luke?”

  “Oh, I do, honey. I think he’s awfully nice. And very polite, too.”

  Now Luke was standing with one arm around Wood and the other around his mother. And Elizabeth was grinning at the three of them and saying something about dancing. Milan gave an anemic smile, thinking, dear God, when would it all end?

  The Purple Crackle nightclub was the kind of place where the live band makes such a ruckus every drink order has to be screamed in a voice that you would normally use to call for help. When Wood and the group entered, the sawdust-covered dance floor, painted by clichéd strobe lights, had become so packed, it was impossible to tell the backup singers from the sweaty patrons. The overall effect was of something that had to put up with, rather than savored and enjoyed. But Wood and Jeter and Brundidge knew this had not always been the case and they exchanged a knowing look, the same one they always gave one another when they came here now.

  The Purple Crackle had been the single greatest secret pleasure of their childhood. Located several miles from downtown, it sat at the very end of Main Street like a forbidden pot of gold. Though it was now freshly painted, it once looked to be the color of burned wood. The entrance was partially hidden by trees and the structure itself resided only two or three feet from the river’s levee. There wasn’t a sign that said it was the Purple Crackle, it was just something people knew. In its heyday, it had been one of the best-known juke joints between Memphis and Kansas City. Only a block or two off the main highway, it became a surprising fixture for struggling talent on their way up, like Leon Redbone, or performers who by the early seventies were just trying to hold on to the last gasp of rock and roll.

  As a boy, Wood had been enticed by the stories Mae Ethel told Slim about who she’d seen performing there—people like Fats Domino and Little Richard, who Mae Ethel said, while covering her mouth laughing, “had just about blown the old tar-paper roof sky high.” Wood, who was only twelve at the time, had wanted to see this for himself. He and Jeter and Brundidge devised a plan that involved sneaking out of their houses around midnight and after meeting in front of Jeter’s Market, riding their bicycles down to the river where they hid behind bushes at first and then eventually climbed an old sycamore tree, which provided the best vantage point from which to view things. As it turned out, there was plenty to see, especially since the Purple
Crackle had a front door that in warm weather was always left open.

  But the show outside was almost as good as the one in—drunk people staggering out into the night, sometimes falling down and passing out on the gravel, fancy women reclining in the backseats of long cars with their dresses over their heads and well-pressed men lying on top of them with their feet hanging out the door and both crying out for the Lord—men fighting and threatening each other and pulling out knives and guns, though miraculously no one was ever shot. The one person the boys never saw misbehave was Mae Ethel, who always wore a hat, with a flower pinned to her bosom and was escorted by her brother as though she was on her way to church. The same place she had taken Wood to see B. B. King, when Wood was still so small that he had to stand up in the pew.

  The boys loved to smell the fumes from the corn mash being produced out in the Crackle’s garage, as well as the aroma of meat that was always cooking in the old smokehouse. But the thing that kept them coming back—sometimes once or twice a week and a few times till dawn—was the music. They had become mesmerized by one of the first songs of rock and roll when Bill Haley, on his final reunion tour with the Comets, sang “See you later, alligator, after a while crocodile.” For weeks, Wood, Brundidge, and Jeter went around singing these old lyrics and looking down on their classmates for failing to grasp or appreciate the coolness of it all. But nothing could have prepared them for the performers who literally shook the walls off the old nightclub, with songs so outrageously soothing and moving and raucous that it was worth staying till the last possible minute and then pedaling your bike so fast your heart almost beat out of your chest all the way home. From Baby Washington and Maxine Brown to the astonishing Nellie Lutcher whose piano sounded even bluer when you stirred in the tree frogs outside. And sometimes there was even a rare appearance by a giant on his way down, like Chuck Berry duckwalking and then getting on his knees and leaning back horizontal with the floor while tearing up the strings of his electric guitar. Afterward the boys had watched wide-eyed as Mr. Berry held out a brown paper bag that was filled with cash out by the garage. And Little Richard, who came once with the Isley Brothers, had stomped his feet and screeched “Lucille” so loud that he had to be carried to his Cadillac as though he had held up a mighty weight for as long as he could with the sheer velocity of those two syllables and was now near death. Another one who brought the house down was Jerry Lee Lewis, who was a no-show three times before his one and only appearance, in which he sang “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” for thirty-eight minutes and then set a man’s chair on fire. The boys had later tried a reenactment of this, causing Brundidge to be grounded for an entire summer after ruining his mother’s dinette set.

  These things had happened over three decades ago, but their occurrence had been so powerful that to this day, when Wood and Jeter and Brundidge step inside the new incarnation of the Purple Crackle, they can’t help feeling a little let down—like men who once walked on the moon and are now stuck in traffic.

  The others found a table, while Wood and Brundidge went off to the bar. In a little while, they returned with several pitchers of beer. Rudy, who had joined up with the group, had just finished dancing with Milan—a kind of hip-hop thing that she had struggled with, but Rudy had graciously guided her through. Milan was good at twirling, not dancing, especially if the dancing was unstructured. Anyway, strobe lights always made her feel uneasy, like something sinister was about to happen.

  Duff was having no such problems. She loved to dance and had been asked by Derek Kingsley, who seemed to have stayed in a good mood since high school. Derek’s family ran a fish house out on the highway and he was currently between wives, which could account for why he greeted Duff, in Milan’s opinion, as though she had come to town to give him a kidney. Anyway, Milan, who was primed to calibrate the most infinitesimal change in her husband tonight, had noticed that he was uncharacteristically cool to Derek. Wood was at the bar now, getting another pitcher of beer. Mavis and Jeter and Brundidge were arguing about what to name the baby, if there ever was one.

  Now Duff and Rudy were dancing next to Elizabeth and Luke. Milan turned toward Wood, who was still standing at the bar. It would have been impossible for anyone else to discern which of the four dancers he was watching with such intensity, but Milan didn’t have to ask. As Wood started back toward the table, the argument that Jeter and Mavis and Brundidge were having had become more heated, until just as the music ended, Brundidge had shouted, “I get to vote, damn it! I drove the damn sperm!”

  Derek Kingsley turned his drink up, pretending not to hear. Mavis looked stricken, then gathered up her ten-pound purse and waddled off to the ladies’ room. Brundidge called after her, “Aw, c’mon. Lighten up. You don’t have to leave.” But Mavis did, anyway, accidentally forming the head of a line of waitresses who balanced their pitchers high in the air, as deftly as African women on their way to market.

  Wood arrived, setting a new pitcher of beer on the table.

  “What was that all about?”

  Jeter answered, “Nothin’. Just a little domestic squabble.”

  Milan had gotten up to go check on Mavis when she noticed that Rudy and Duff were now in each other’s arms, undulating to the soulful beat. And that Wood was still watching appreciatively. Then a buxom brunette who looked too tender to have gotten past the bouncer cut in, asking Rudy to dance. It was so perfect, Milan wanted to cheer. Duff had been thrown over for a younger girl. And right in front of everyone. A shamefully meager victory, but one that could sustain Milan until something more substantial came along. She turned back to make sure Wood had seen it, too. And that was when she noticed the empty chair—saw that he was no longer in it, and curiously, it had jarred her heart a little. And then she watched as he slowly made his way across the dance floor toward Duff, who was now waiting with her hands on her hips and shaking her head up and down, pleased, as though she had known all along that he would come.

  Mavis emerged from the ladies’ room. Milan put out her hand, smoothing her best friend’s hair, “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine.” She blew her nose into a Kleenex. “I just cannot be around thoughtless, insensitive people when I’m on these hormones.”

  Milan put her arm on Mavis’s back and rubbed it for a moment. She, too, was now worn out from the tensions and stress of the day. She looked back at the dance floor and saw that Duff had upgraded her moves to the point that other dancers had stopped to watch. Wood was only the dazzled spectator now and Duff, the show. She moved coolly and self-assuredly around him—pushing her hips in slow, circular motions to the suggestive vibe, then humping the air with her hand on her abdomen and swinging her head from side to side, with her cheeks sucked in and her hair over her eyes. Wood was thinking he hadn’t seen anyone move so beautifully within the confines of the Purple Crackle since Little Richard. Elizabeth and Luke had burst into applause and Wood shook his head a little, in wonderment. Milan was shaking hers in wonderment, too. The years seemed to have literally fallen away from the woman with dark circles under her eyes who when she had arrived this morning, hadn’t even appeared to have good posture, but was now standing tall and filling out every inch of her cheap clothes. Duff wasn’t Bud from Splendor in the Grass anymore. She had literally transformed herself right in front of Milan’s eyes. Not only had the little JCPenney ensemble, with its thin, fluid fabric taken on a sensual quality, but her eyes were fiery and bright—made even more alluring by the strobe lights, which were now colored. And her lips appeared to be alternately pouty and laughing, as the ever changing shards of light caught each move. Pouty. Laughing. Pouty. Laughing. Pouty. Laughing. Now Elizabeth and Luke had melted into the other dancers. As far as Milan could tell, there was no one left but Wood and Duff. And right now, Duff was dancing over to him, was actually touching him, grinding her hips against his, then squatting and working her way up the length of him, audaciously shaking her tits as she went. Milan looked at Mavis and was shocked that she did
n’t seem to think there was anything out of the ordinary going on here at all. The music had become deafening now, and the crowd was shouting the words with the band. Duff was also shouting them, and Milan thought she saw Wood singing a little, too. In all the years she had known him, Milan had never known Wood to sing while he was dancing.

  “Don’t you ever feel sad. Lean on me when times are bad.”

  She searched the faces of the spectators. What was wrong with these people? Could they not see that her husband and this ripe, grinding bitch were now in violation of the social contract under which all decent human beings operate?

  “Hold on, I’m comin’! Hold on, I’m comin’!”

  Suddenly, the strobe lights caught Duff wetting her lips with her tongue. And Milan was shocked to see that her old nemesis had finally become the serpent she had always known lay underneath the handsome façade. Milan put her hand to her head. Maybe Mavis was right. Maybe teaching Sunday school was making her too dramatic. Because she was convinced that the serpent’s head was now hideously arched—that “the thing” was now sticking its tongue out repeatedly, defying her, taunting her—viciously swatting its big, fat tail around for all the world to see, like some terrible man-eating creature out of a science-fiction horror film that would soon find its way to Milan’s house, destroying everything and everyone in it.