by Retha Powers
She had seen her grandmother take Shame-Billy into the garden and remove his trousers behind the blackberry thicket. The woman traveled the boy’s hand along her breast, stopping at the nipple, encircling the massive dark space there.—You’re all mine, the old woman had said.
Rhonda had witnessed this, the boy writhing in pleasure, a brief period of exploration and gasps, after which the pair of them, thick as thieves, stoically marched up to the house and returned to the garden carrying jars of lemonade. Rhonda had seen this. She had seen naked butts, breasts, arms, necks, tongues; braids and curls undone. Then a tall jar of lemonade, sides beading with sweat, the contents sometimes disappearing in one monstrous gulp.
In the yard the janitor would occasionally push his ash can on wheels over in Rhonda’s direction. He would stand in the way of her light, darkening her awake, then make a simple joke about the weather or the misdeeds of the children. Sometimes his words contained faint praise.
—Say Miss Rhonda, the janitor would begin.—You looking pretty good there. You looking like you taking care of business. I know. I do the same myself.
(He knew he was the only one who ever talked to her because to his mind the rest of the teachers were uppity and the principal was a fag; that left him as the only person to appreciate the glory of Miss Rhonda Robinson. He was old as the hills and until now did not think anything of removing his teeth from his overall pocket and casually setting them in his head during conversation. The children made fun of him, leaving nasty notes on blackboards for him to read. He shrugged his shoulder: Hadn’t his own kids behaved the selfsame way? Hadn’t they called him narrow and dirty, all run away from home in bits and pieces—but that was years and years ago, and nowadays he was even having trouble remembering their names, the years in which they had been born, or even the shapes of their heads.)
Mr. Blank approached Miss Robinson on ash-can wheels.—Hey there, Miss Rhonda, he said.
—Hey there, Mr. Blank, Rhonda replied blandly, watching the children scatter around her.—How you?
—Can’t complain, he answered. He held his lips tightly over his teeth.—Kids been treating you right?
—Same as ever.
—You ever think of having any of your own, Miss Rhonda? You’d make a fine woman.
(He’d meant to say mother. Mr. Blank kicked himself for this mistake.)
Rhonda nodded demurely; she too noticed what he’d said. He wouldn’t have said it if he had seen her last Christmas Eve. In fact, his eyes would have popped out of his head if he’d seen the things she and Billy did together. Old man don’t know his dick from his thumb. She turned and walked away.
That night, Mr. Blank took his dreams about Rhonda to bed. He was still a young man, if you counted desire as proof.
He folded his withered hands in prayer, just like his wife of long ago had taught him, only now he did not pray to Jesus or to the Lord Most High but to a caramel woman with large knees; he prayed to her loud fruity perfume and its spell over her shoulders; to the daisy shape of her mouth; to the way she did up her hair in two braided buns on the side of her head like women from the old days. He prayed to the volume of her behind as she switched down the hallways, shooing children to class. He prayed to the big words she used, the airs she put on, the way she smiled at the girls, maternal. He prayed to clothes, in particular to the black-and-pink gingham dress, the one that she had obviously sewn down to look more matronly, only for him it was obvious that you could let out a seam here and there and be pleasantly surprised. She was the stuff of dreams.
—Lord, let me not want, he prayed, before falling asleep.
Back in Auntsville, the meetings between the two lovers had been confined to the vegetable garden in the swarm of a late-afternoon sun, ticklish groping and instruction until ritual lemonade. She knew boys his age loved to drink, just as they loved tearing apart insects and running stolen cars and burying them in the field. This one was different, though; he barely touched the jar.
She sat next to him on the porch swing, where he did not think about insects or lemonade but about how he had just embraced her, how they had lain across vines of sugar-snap peas and moaned in unison. He had never heard voices travel at the same time, and found it bewitching. She’d allowed his tongue in her mouth as they sat amid rows of strawberries, a romantic touch. Through her dress, he massaged the womanly triangle between her legs while she dug her fingers into the earth, upsetting the birth of radish, carrot, and white sweet potato. She was not like the others. She did not scream, she did not harm his body or cause a haze to cover his eyes like a cobweb.
He wanted to go on, but she eventually stopped him, the sun hanging like a grapefruit in the sky. Like the other times, they did not make love. He was a child after all, she reasoned. She only wanted him to know what to do when the time came; said she was tired of girls being afraid of what they really wanted—soon he would become teacher. Just think of this as a sort of practice run.
But he did not want to practice forever. He wanted the seasoning of oldness; in his heart he imagined the heat of something undone and unraveling. He took her in his arms on the porch and uttered the words,—I love you.
Strangely, she shunned him.
Love was not for an old woman with things to teach. She demanded he notice her hips, her thighs, the way her breasts did not sag like other old women’s. That he should look and dream; that he should measure up to her imagination; that he should not ask for earth when moon and stars danced in front of his nose. That he should not fall in love.
—Look at my granddaughter Rhonda, Asenath had told him then, wiping away his tears.—Rhonda is a person you can love. She is not like me at all.
Late in the afternoon on the last day of school, Mr. Blank had pushed his broom up to the teachers’ lounge and watched Rhonda eat her sandwich: fried chicken cutlet on hero bread, two large sweet pickles, a container of vanilla pudding. He moved extra slow, emptying the wastebaskets and clapping the erasers clean, touching the teachers’ coats, straightening arms and lapels. She gulped coffee from a thermos and licked her lips like a cat. Mr. Blank checked the wastebaskets again.
He longed to pass Miss Rhonda and touch her on the cheek. To roll his ash can her way and kiss the velvet off her skin. An act of solidarity: He and she were terribly alone here. They were not teachers. They had no children. They withdrew themselves in dreams, he was sure.
Rhonda Robinson wearily glanced at him, then got up to adjust her dress in the mirror.
All he’d really wanted was a taste of Rhonda’s hand. A confirmation.
Mr. Blank went outside the lounge and waited until she miraculously appeared; he walked her to the gymnasium. She was supposed to help line up the colored kids to be tested for sickle cell, help stop the little ones from crying at the sight of the needle. Mr. Blank told her he admired such kindness in a person.
—I wouldn’t want to know if I was going to die tomorrow, he said.—I always just want to make the most of my days.
—These are little kids, Rhonda replied, annoyed.—They can’t make those decisions for themselves.
—Still, he continued,—I wouldn’t want to know. I’d want to live my life in the best way possible. Don’t you agree, Miss Rhonda?
—Who wouldn’t want to live their life in the best way? she snapped, opening the door to the gym. Then added,—You know, you remind me of someone.
—Miss Rhonda! he interrupted, alarmed that he should actually be in her thoughts. This was too much.—There’s something I need to tell you in person!
But it was too late. Rhonda had already walked into the throngs of frightened children and once more left Mr. Blank behind.
The snow had simmered to almost nothing once Billy reached the exit to West Amity on the Southern State Parkway. Oddly, a warmth filled the car, a warmth as damp and spongy as spring air. He had to keep his eyes open for the bright pink house. A shame to ruin a perfectly good house with that color, but what was that his business? The girl had som
ething strange and permanent against her grandmother, but don’t ask him.
Shame-Billy pulled the car into the driveway; no Rhonda. He waited.
(At their last meeting, when he was fifteen, Asenath had poked her tongue in and out of his ear, sparking his juices into electricity, but again at the word love, she recoiled. There was a warning. If he spoke it again, she would take another boy under her wing. If he spoke it again, she would lock the gate to her vegetables—forever. What was the purpose in loving, anyway? He had his whole life ahead of him. And she would be leaving for Long Island sometime soon, to the place where a body could get a regular house, not some old run-down thing.)
He went through the list in his mind. How he decided to call her bluff. How she’d finally left Auntsville for Long Island in what seemed to him to be the middle of the night. How he’d cried. How she had left him with only the scent of cloves and onion on his hands. How he hated the scent of betrayal.
How he took any and every woman who walked by him and ravished them with his new skills. How he broke hearts. The list continued: How he sent letters to a phantom address called the Plantation and when he received no reply, how he humped one girl after the other in vengeance. How he moved about aimlessly until about seven years ago, when, retribution in mind, he left for Long Island, only to have things change.
He’d vigorously sought out Rhonda, but at her door the first time discovered that the years had softened him. Add to that a house to practically call his own and a woman who answered the door, genuinely happy to see him. A loving woman, a receptive woman, one who would do just about anything at the drop of a hat. Did not trouble him with the word love but would walk on all fours or lie still as a dead person. Things had a way of metamorphosing, like a worm into a butterfly. A garden of sheer delights.
In the car he sat alone and waited. Seven years would end tonight. In the morning he and Rhonda would go and find her grandmother. Seven years had gone by without so much as a mention of her full name: Asenath Gertrude Fowler—how ungrateful! To Rhonda he had only called her the old woman, the bag of bones, the battle-ax. The crazy bitch. Now his heart shattered at its cruelty.
The lights were on everywhere in the house. Slowly, Billy Merry left the car and walked up the path to the front door.
Minutes before that, Rhonda had fallen into the chair in front of the vanity mirror. —Gone, she said to herself, —gone.
There was no answer to her tears, no legend or inscription on the rock-hardness of her memory, no unearthed instruction to forgive and forget—and the fact of that absence only made her cry harder.
Sitting on the corner of his bed, ready to spring into action, Mr. Blank was overcome by the faintest aromas of memory and fell backward on the mattress —Lord, give me strength, he mumbled, only the words came out like cattle’s lowing. He put his head in his hands. —My children! he cried.
Why was he alone? Why couldn’t he remember them? Everything had backfired, all the lessons and whippings and misguided attempts at feeling; sitting in a corner, in a closet, no light, too much light. Year by year they had all left the house, especially the girls, telling him he was incapable of love, warning him to stay far away. The boys learned to disavow his existence.
He wept. Rhonda Robinson would understand things differently. She would applaud his intentions—only just then he was not completely sure Rhonda wasn’t one of his own. Hadn’t he raised a girl like her, with legs shaped like vines? Hadn’t he seen lips like Rhonda’s in his house for years? Where?
Hadn’t someone screamed at him because he loved too much? Or not enough? Where were they all?
Flat on the bed, he was convinced of the possibilities of life and of death, of sin and forgiveness, the power of lust that had layered, one night superimposing the next, for years and years and years, world without end. Desire had never abandoned him, had never left him or his dreams for dead.
And so, later that night, Mr. Blank found himself at Sixty-six North Moss Drive, in front of Rhonda Robinson’s house. At the far end of the cul-de-sac he saw a car slowly edging its way on the road and knew instinctively that the car was moving toward the pink house. He stepped into a hedge of holly and waited.
Somewhere an owl whispered in the branches. A tiny voice scolded, making him tear his hand along the edge of a leaf. The car pulled into the driveway: a man at its helm. The tiny voice scolded again, and he recognized this as the voice of his wife, long gone. She was advising him to remember himself.
—No one can work miracles, she admonished, then faded into the holly in his hand.
After some time Billy Merry forced open the front door and found Rhonda curled in a ball by the stove. He unpeeled her gently and placed her in a kitchen chair. He asked her what was wrong.
—My grandma, she murmured.—I just got the call. She died tonight at the Plantation.
He winced, but not too visibly. Gone. He lifted the fainted Rhonda upstairs to the bedroom, passing the familiar slipcovered couch and splintered stair railing. Only after he lay her on the bed did she awaken and recall what this evening was supposed to hold.
—I can’t do none of that! she shouted, bolting upright. (She remembered the curl of his hair, the way he resembled a Greek statue: Homer, Oedipus, Cupid!)—No! none of that now, please!
Billy gently motioned her to lie down; all that was far from his mind.
After fixing a wet rag on her forehead, he went into the other room and sat at the vanity. Minutes later he got up, fixed himself a drink, and took off his coat. Seven years had ended sooner than he’d imagined.
In the confines of the holly hedge, warm air lifting the night into Bethlehem, Mr. Blank undid his coat, slipped off the tie he had sloppily fastened to his neck, unbuttoned his best work shirt, and exposed his nubbed chest to the air.—If she wants me, she’ll have me, he announced to the owl-less tree.
He looked up at what he thought was her window—beyond it, he envisioned a soft canopied bed and a pair of porcelain ballerina slippers atop an oak bureau. Time would pass; an apple cobbler would burn in the oven. Time would pass. He saw a woman squatting over him as if he were a bath of warm mud, moaning in pleasure, rolling her eyes to the back of her head.
He continued undressing, despite the chill and rustle of the hedge. He did not want her to come out and laugh at him. And yet, he could not help sending her this vision.
—What took you so long? his wife whispered from his hand.—This woman’s been here forever, seems.
He shivered. He was almost naked.
—You don’t need to ask about me, she continued.—Time heals all wounds. Even I forgive you for looking the other way.
—What do that mean? he asked.
—I was your wife, she answered.—I was the chance you had, but you looked the other way, time after time.
—Now is not the place for all that, he snarled.
—It always has a place, she sighed.—I was there forever, too.
So there was no real reason to keep on coming here anymore, now, was there?
Billy looked at Rhonda in the bed and searched her face, her ears, her nape. He did not like the fall of her tears; they sounded like something he hated to hear in people, in women: loss.
What would loving be like after tonight? Asenath was gone. What was the purpose?
Billy poured himself another tumbler of Bristol Cream and walked back to the bed where Rhonda lay whimpering under a flutter of vanilla sheets. On her dress, the zipper had split itself from the fabric, exposing thousands of tiny threads that wiggled in the open like worms, revealing her large smooth back and the soft length of vertebrae; her shoulders.
He pictured the earth of the garden underneath his feet, the pebbles and soil and secret waterways, and, somewhere in the distance, a pot simmering on the stove. A pitcher of undrunk lemonade. Cloves and onions. His name had never really been Shame-Billy. It had always been Bill. William. My Lover.
He stretched himself out next to Rhonda. Downstairs the doorbell r
ang, but neither of them seemed to hear it. He reached over to her head and began smoothing the undone hair. Then he laid his hand on her neck.—There, there, baby, he said.—I love you.
She turned to face him. Behind her, the night sky full of the perfume of a dying winter.
—Tell me was it enough! she cried, squared to his face, the first time.—Tell me: Will it ever be enough?
The room settled with quiet. He stared back into Rhonda’s eyes, searching for the remainder of the evening, for the remainder of his life with this woman, the inevitability of box living combined with the inevitability of love, the mud tracks out of the garden and onto the asphalt, but just then the doorbell rang again and woke him and Rhonda from their dreams.
—Why am I changing? Asenath asked herself in bed earlier that evening. The clock had just rung seven.
Christmas Eve—the time of Love and Bounty and Family, only here she was—alone. For days she’d had the taste for garden dirt and for sun-streaked skin against her mouth, but her mind had abandoned her, making it impossible to properly sort out people and places. She threw off her blankets; outside there was nothing but an unusually balmy wind. The other women in the Plantation had stopped in her room to say good night, then turned their faces and wept. Someone gloomily asked if she wanted her Bible.
All her life she had dreamed of coming up north and leaving behind the beautiful and oppressive sunsets of North Carolina. All her life.
Now, prone in bed, all she could do was yearn for those skies; for heat and large gardens and busy kitchens and rundown houses and long gospel gowns that swept the floor. Back in Auntsville she had done many things—she had known a boy in the rows of her vegetables and herbs. Where was he now? Why had she turned him away? He fit neatly into a box of her design, but where? Here in Long Island her insides had withered to nothing.
