She presented Jeanette with another fat, exaggerated pout. Even as the smallest little boy, Wesley had never acted the brat like this. He was an even-tempered, sweet-natured little soldier, acting unaware of the tragedy that had happened to him. Jeanette would come home from work, excuse the sitter with a small tip, and get down on the floor next to him and his Legos or Tinkertoys. Pretty soon she would be thinking about dinner and announce the menu. “Oh, delicious!” he said, his head inclined to the floor and caught in a cloud of building plans. It seemed apparent to Jeanette that in her childhood Alison had not often been called upon to use her imagination for much except perhaps how she was going to feed herself. (Jeanette imagined a jar of peanut butter almost empty, the two heels of the stale loaf of sliced white sandwich bread pressed together like praying hands.) Alison was not just languid, self-pitying, she was lifeless—and too pale usually.
Now Jeanette said, singing the irritation from her voice, “Out with it, what in the world?”
Alison kept with the pout, nearly intolerable. Nothing would straighten her out. It wasn’t going well between them; it never would. Jeanette should stop frequenting Jo’s Little Reef—and she’d tell Wesley they needed to develop new habits, new traditions. They were each older now.
“Alison, it can’t be as bad as that,” Jeanette said confidently. “Have you been diabetic a long time? I mean, is it the juvenile kind, or the adult type 2 that you develop later on in life?”
Alison looked at her incredulously. She was a girl, a young woman, who if she’d just lost a little weight and let her hair grow would be almost lovely or lovely enough. Alison had pierced her nose and lips and whatever other parts of her body. She had a range of tattoos, mostly on her chubby arms, what the girl called sleeves. Jeanette imagined that she was putting herself through a series of African tribal scarification ceremonies. Alison’s girlfriends, her lovers, never worked out. The most dramatic failure—briefly but widely broadcast scuttlebutt—was the time when an older lady in black leather named Rita rode into town from way up north on a slung-back Harley sweeping Alison off her feet and onto the back of her bike for an intense, theatrical few weeks of bar storming, suspenseful knife-wielding jealousy fits, and at least one police arrest during happy hour, which Jeanette and Wesley had witnessed. Rita had never lived at a fixed address, although she’d worn clipped to her belt a ring loaded with shiny keys, and according to gossip had pushed on in the middle of the night suddenly, aiming her obsidian hog down at some place on the Gulf Coast. It was all too sordid to inquire about, yet Alison had come begging Jeanette for sympathy. Alison had hung the moon for Rita. Rita had told her this repeatedly. Plus it had been Alison’s sincere understanding that the two of them would ride off together to Pensacola and open a B&B on Santa Rosa Island or along the East Bay. With what money, Jeanette had no idea. Pensionless dreams. They got you into trouble. It only meant other people would have to clean up after you.
“Honey, first and foremost,” Jeanette had told her that time, “just take care of yourself.”
She’d said some variation of this every time she’d seen Alison for the next several weeks. Jeanette had been very lucky with Wesley. But at a certain age—if you weren’t careful—the stuffing went out of you. If Wes himself didn’t find more direction, he’d end up alone, lost, lost.
“You’re young, so let’s just see how strong you can be. It’s a test, and we’ll see how well you pass it—I bet with flying colors,” she’d said, secretly without much confidence in Alison.
Jeanette had almost opened up to Alison about her husband, whom she remembered quite vividly, and who’d left Jeanette and baby Lisa early on. Marrying him, she’d known it was only for his name. No child of hers would be a bastard—at the time it was still quite the stigmatizing, cruel fate for any kid around here—and she’d always seen through Edwin. Edwin was handsome, but she had never quite believed his routine, his false Dale Carnegie act. He’d go three days and no drink, then come spectacularly crashing down off the wagon. He could not hold onto a job. It wasn’t the right environment for raising a child, and even then Jeanette had known that if she had to, she could go it alone. And one night as she sat up worrying, while little Lisa slept in oblivion, the decision ended up making itself. Edwin had called from his office at Prudential to say he was taking clients out to the Post and King Lounge and promised to drink ginger ale. It was the last time she’d ever hear from him. No one taking her calls at Prudential had caught sight of him in weeks. In fact, he’d been let go or walked out a while back—it was unclear which, and no one was saying, especially not his boss, who’d calmly registered his categorical wishes to her that all should work out well. He’d inquired about the baby, then said he had to take a call. Jeanette had needed someone to talk to, she’d realized only much later. Women back then had had no reliable confidantes. All the women she knew even vaguely were churchgoers. They’d sooner sell you a Brooklyn Bridge in Jerusalem than try easing your mind, assign you the blame as the nice lady.
Now to Alison she said, “I had a boss at the law firm where I worked before I retired, one of the attorneys, and he was diabetic and had to inject himself twice a day. But I’d thought folks with it now didn’t have to use needles anymore. I mean, isn’t there an oral medication you could take, or stick yourself with one of those new pen doohickeys? I’d heard there was, anyway.”
Jeanette had always taken care of herself more or less. She felt less sure of what she was attempting to say, and the way Alison was looking at her suggested Jeanette was mistaken.
“No, ma’am,” Alison said, her eyes big and pathetic. She sighed, looking away, and said earnestly, patiently, and rather condescendingly, “Ma’am, it’s hormones for my reassignment.”
She said this and her interlocutor felt shaken, but it was a slow epiphany as to why. She laughed at herself, or would later. Jeanette Deirdre Blake, you are truly behind the times, lady!
Jeanette was still caught up in the pleasantly advancing spring afternoon. Earlier she had walked on the beach south of the Holiday Inn. And now the sun that the front door of Jo’s Little Reef—a glass door—emitted was a poignant, nostalgic hammered gold, going into a bloodied bronze any minute. She wanted to feel good about her life, about this day. She’d lived it through and it wasn’t bad. She had enough money between her pension from the law firm and her Social Security to see her through and exit gracefully and leave some to Wesley. She felt slapped by her own insensitivity and ignorance. Had Wesley said something to her about this sex change? They didn’t say sex change anymore—it implied all the wrong things. Gender reassignment it went.
“Oh,” said Jeanette, “how foolish of me,” and she touched Alison’s chubby clammy hand.
Now she decided she might, a slight fascination sparked in her, come to like her. Him.
“It’s really hard,” Alison said and she watched Jeanette. “I have to go out for a cigarette.”
“Go and do that,” said Jeanette, without adding what they’d discuss later. Sex. Having it and being one, possessing gender and using that to mate—the world’s horny hubris …
Alison got up. Jeanette wondered about all the chemicals, the hormones and nicotine and alcohol, swimming through Alison’s system, all of this constantly introduced foreign matter. She might survive it, but she might not. Jeanette remembered worrying that a Tylenol she’d taken for a sore ankle after a day’s running about the firm when she still worked would mix unpropitiously with a glass of wine, which she felt guilty enough about—drinking, in front of an impressionable boy with some drinking issues already in his family history. She wanted a glass to help her wash down their Salisbury steak TV dinner, which she hated to serve a growing boy, all that salt, those chemicals they added. Wesley got a glass of milk to allay her fears. What a hysteric she still was in those days, completely unable yet to quit foolishly focusing on the feckless, gone-gone Edwin.
The sun went down over and beyond the Intracoastal, and it made Alison’s shadow
faint, watery. Then Alison moved to the side of the door with her cigarette and the sun hit Jeanette’s face full-on and she winced. Wesley had his last day of driver’s safety. The accident was not his fault, except on paper, a light bumper-bash he’d caused from behind, but still he had to complete this duty, and it never hurt to learn something new. Jeanette herself had never been involved in a fender bender that was legally her fault. She still drove her Ciera when she had to run to the post office or bank or the CVS. That was about it. She didn’t want to push it—her reflexes no longer what they were. She nearly tasted that baby stack at St. Louis Grill. Wesley behind the wheel of his Toyota, his pride and toy. She worried about his consumerism, his yen for pricey goods when he should be concentrating on his MBA, maybe increase his course load and get done faster. She wanted to see him in something better than managing the breakfast shift at Wagon Wheel. Truck drivers and Yankee tourists zooming through and stopping for pancakes and sausage on their way south, to points down along the coast or to Sea World and Disney World. As a pubescent Wesley was obsessed by all things Disney and said he planned to be what he’d explained to Jeanette was called an Imagineer by the Walt Disney Company. He checked out books from the library. With his allowance, when they went to Disney, he bought souvenir editions with mind-opening photos of the planning and building of the theme park. “An Imagineer,” he explained to Jeanette, “is the man who dreams up, he imagines, a ride. He draws it out and he makes up the story, and it’s the best, most wonderful job.” Wesley was captivated by what were called the audio-animatronics, the robots like Abraham Lincoln in the Hall of Presidents or a ghoul in the Haunted Mansion, the only trouble being that Wesley was bad in math. She’d tried to get him to take his algebra a great deal more seriously, but Wesley’s head was full of dreams—he wasn’t practical. His impractical nature, too, may have been her fault. That sort of thing wasn’t genetic, was it? It was built into a way of upbringing, and she could never have given him enough attention. Curiously, she’d never blamed his sexuality— what was the right, usable word, identity?—on herself. They were finding out all sorts of wonderful scientific things now, which she wouldn’t live to see being proved over and over again in the faces of the redneck local right-wingers who were so self-satisfied and sure of themselves. Jeanette remembered thinking how people in that last church she’d ever attended in downtown Jacksonville, First Baptist, had looked at her with pity and a false-approval smirk—it was so obvious what they were truly thinking—heading up the aisle, holding little Lisa’s hand. She remembered the last time. She pushed right past the pastor in the after-service receiving line and Lisa said, “Mom, aren’t you supposed to shake his hand?” Sure, dear, if you’re a big sucker.
Outside, two voices semaphored back and forth, light into sound. Jeanette was tipsy.
A second silhouette, flaming at the edges with orange sunset, slid across the glass pausing in the dully gleaming aluminum frame. The cowbell trip-wired above the frame gonged, then the shadow spread dissipating through the interior as the man causing it entered and became the kind of hefty local-yokel species of dude you saw a lot of, many of whom ran things. He slid into the place opposite hers, and numbed by the tequila and triple sec, she heard her name calmly said.
“Jeanette?”
He removed his mirrored shades and exhaled garlic, scooting and settling himself daintily into Alison’s abandoned place and causing the vinyl-encased foam to emit a high, thin fart sound.
Needing time to collect herself, before she gave herself away, she smiled lightly, quickly.
“Hidey, Jeanette,” said Sam Garth, as though he thought she hadn’t yet noticed him.
Tartly, Jeanette squirmed slightly and said, touching herself lightly, “Well hi, I reckon.”
This was too much. Put it on TV and—no, not if you’d seen TV lately, “reality shows.”
She wouldn’t look at him except in snatches. He’d left so long ago. She’d barely caught sight of his face back then before he’d become a blur in her and Lisa’s life. Wesley had not even been born, it was that urgent, though in memory the exchange had seemed so slow, such a blur.
“Had no idea you’d stick to the same neighborhood,” said Sam. He looked good, his hair the same coal dark. His beard was kept trimmed, though the hair was buzzed too close—making the lantern jaw and flaring dark eyebrows too familiar. It was no wonder she knew him right off. He had the same careful way of adding phrases, suspenseful phrases building one upon the other, and Sam said, as she noticed a few stubbly strands of silver catching the light, “I missed y’all.”
“Really. Missed us.”
Her blouse had shoulder pads and she huffed one up. She remembered sending a letter to Wilmington, his last known address, to tell him about Lisa. She’d stewed so long before writing that. He hadn’t replied. She had Wesley, already enjoying his tricycle and full of life— and there was no time to look back. The past was too preoccupying: go into the now, think about what was coming up. The future could be more interesting, anyway, than yesterday. She’d thought of Sam as a disappointment from the moment he’d come home with Lisa. It wasn’t that he was a loser; it was too early then to tell. Smart, nice-looking, yet the environment didn’t offer much for anyone not raised on golf. All any Garth boy had was killing looks, perpetual dark hair, silver-ice eyes.
“Just gonna sit there ignoring me,” he said, chuckling. How she’d loathed that chuckle.
“I can be civil,” Jeanette said and panned her gaze closer toward him, unblinking still.
“Look always scared the bejesus out of me.”
“What look? Either you do or you don’t want me looking at you. Which is it, Samuel?”
“You remember my friend Royce?” he said. “That was so good with plants and things?”
“Who opened the Cedar Branch Gardening Center off of Butler? Used to see him lots.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “When I left, Butler was just a strip to near nowhere.” He wrinkled his brow and it was spooky. Wesley had taken his name, of course. One day, was Wesley going to have this same tired, post-handsome look that was just seductive enough? “Well, so,” he said, snickering wetly, “back then I didn’t know what that green thumb indicated. Now I don’t care.”
Jeanette slid her drink aside. Wanting another taste, now she wouldn’t touch it again.
“So y’all’ve stayed in touch. The two of you, you and Royce. Interesting, I’d say.”
“That’s right,” he said, but didn’t bow his head in shame. Even more interesting. She’d always liked bold-faced honesty, an antidote to mealy-mouthed Southern demurral. But this.
He did something odd. With his balled fist he thumped around the left side of his chest. Heart pain, palpating around for echoes of a twinge? A rattle to knock back in place? Disease?
She said, “Mr. Garth, are you all right?” and his yellow-white smile flashed and he quit.
“To answer the other, I’d get in touch with Royce coming through from time to time. You know how we used to run around. It was the three of us, Lisa and me and him, the Fletcher Trio, ha—and it riled me having to let go. I did start driving trucks, and I liked Wilmington and had a girlfriend, but she wanted me to marry her. Naturally, no way—but why blame her for asking?”
Impatient with his meandering, wanting to tell him they were almost done, she pursed her lips and said, “I’m sorry about your father, I’m sorry about your brother. But Sam, come on get a grip. This is pretty late in the game now. Want to see your kin, fine, but you and I aren’t blood.”
Buster had taken his time coming over, sensing the awkwardness and sensitivity between them. He approached with his jaw wryly set and said to Sam, “Howdy, anything I can get you?”
Nor did the denim hot pants seem to unsettle Sam, who nodded saying, “I’d like a Coke, if you wouldn’t mind.” Jeanette enjoyed watching him “not” be disgusted. “Easy on the ice?”
“Maybe charge that to me, Buster,” Jeanette said.
> “A tab lady,” said Sam. “I like it but good night, I can manage to pay for my own Coke.”
“Suit yourself.”
All that time ago she’d decided the legal drinking age should be set at thirty. Wesley had escaped the evils overall, she thought, but what if you had just this one law in place? What was left of their conversation consisted of his AA story. Of course, AA. What else? All these good old boys went into AA, had they any sense at all. And she was glad for him. If only he’d had the sense to do it thirty-some-odd years ago, they wouldn’t be here now. She wouldn’t be here now.
They’d given Wes a breathalyzer and it was negative, Wes had said. Had said.
He needed a lot of love and he was crazy with this need for it. He was crazy about sex. He was nearly six feet tall, like his daddy it was said, although he’d never met the man. His height made an impression with males and females alike. He was worried about his baldness. He wasn’t bald yet but his temples were receding. There wasn’t a lot of time. He was in a hurry just now, trying to get to Anastasia Island. Royce had a forty-five-minute window. Oh, what was the point!
There was a girl in his statistics he’d liked, Shauna, so funny. She undercut what went on in class, texting him from two feet away. If he were straight, and though she’d had a big butt and wasn’t conventionally pretty, Wesley would go for her. One day he’d gone into class but Shauna wasn’t there. That following Monday not there either, then not the Wednesday after. He went to see the lecturer, hot Blaylock getting on in years. Wes had kind of a thing for Blaylock, who was paunchy from disappointment but had this alive face. Later Wes felt crappy about thinking about Blaylock sexually, in light of what he’d learned. Life was designed to make you feel guilty. The subject, too: he couldn’t concentrate on business, on figures, numbers. Wes was a people guy. It made him feel alive out on the floor of the Wagon Wheel, scooting in to help his girls pick up the dirty dishes, nod hi to the folks, make a few one-liners, and wink at the wives. Folks took you as you took them. They were nice when you gave them a chance. They saw the swish in your step, they drew their lips forth in a cheesy Hollywood gesture, but that didn’t mean much. Everybody wanted regard. They liked manners; they played along. Love was like that. Love wasn’t perfect but it was patient, it was kind. And there was wisdom in the trying to be gentle. So many people and so little time to make an impression. And he liked the Wagon Wheel model, down-home. It was not a bad organization. It was owned by serious Christians in Nashville. Officially gay was not good with that bunch. But here they came, almost every day, he picked up on them. Turning in an application, wanting an interview. Oh, the world could change slowly, one face at a time!
Little Reef and Other Stories Page 10
