With her paycheck, Jeannette buys Rodney a present, a miniature trampoline they have seen advertised on television. It is called Mr. Bouncer. Rodney is thrilled about the trampoline, and he jumps on it until his face is red. Jeannette discovers that she enjoys it, too. She puts it out on the grass, and they take turns jumping. She has an image of herself on the trampoline, her sailor collar flapping, at the moment when Donald returns and sees her flying. One day a neighbor driving by slows down and calls out to Jeannette as she is bouncing on the trampoline, “You’ll tear your insides loose!” Jeannette starts thinking about that, and the idea is so horrifying she stops jumping so much. That night, she has a nightmare about the trampoline. In her dream, she is jumping on soft moss, and then it turns into a springy pile of dead bodies.
III
Love Lives
There’s always sadness lurking in our love lives—missed opportunities, missed connections, a string of losses. But both memory and anticipation propel us along, sometimes on an exhilarating ride. Tone is my guide to the inner lives of the characters. Tone is the sound of their inner voices, how they express themselves to themselves. Finding the right tone for the story means the characters can come alive. And then, whether they’re sad or happy, we are there with them, and we are more alive ourselves.
—BAM
Love Life
FROM Love Life (1989)
Opal lolls in her recliner, wearing the Coors cap her niece Jenny brought her from Colorado. She fumbles for the remote-control paddle and fires a button. Her swollen knuckles hurt. On TV, a boy is dancing in the street. Some other boys dressed in black are banging guitars and drums. This is her favorite program. It is always on, night or day. The show is songs, with accompanying stories. It’s the music channel. Opal never cared for stories—she detests those soap operas her friends watch—but these fascinate her. The colors and the costumes change and flow with the music, erratically, the way her mind does these days. Now the TV is playing a song in which all the boys are long-haired cops chasing a dangerous woman in a tweed cap and a checked shirt. The woman’s picture is in all their billfolds. They chase her through a cold-storage room filled with sides of beef. She hops on a motorcycle, and they set up a roadblock, but she jumps it with her motorcycle. Finally, she slips onto a train and glides away from them, waving a smiling goodbye.
On the table beside Opal is a Kleenex box, her glasses case, a glass of Coke with ice, and a cut-glass decanter of clear liquid that could be just water for the plants. Opal pours some of the liquid into the Coke and sips slowly. It tastes like peppermint candy, and it feels soothing. Her fingers tingle. She feels happy. Now that she is retired, she doesn’t have to sneak into the teachers’ lounge for a little swig from the jar in her pocketbook. She still dreams algebra problems, complicated quadratic equations with shifting values and no solutions. Now kids are using algebra to program computers. The kids in the TV stories remind her of her students at Hopewell High. Old age could have a grandeur about it, she thinks now as the music surges through her, if only it weren’t so scary.
But she doesn’t feel lonely, especially now that her sister Alice’s girl, Jenny, has moved back here, to Kentucky. Jenny seems so confident, the way she sprawls on the couch, with that backpack she carries everywhere. Alice was always so delicate and feminine, but Jenny is enough like Opal to be her own daughter. She has Opal’s light, thin hair, her large shoulders and big bones and long legs. Jenny even has a way of laughing that reminds Opal of her own laughter, the boisterous scoff she always saved for certain company but never allowed herself in school. Now and then Jenny lets loose one of those laughs and Opal is pleased. It occurs to her that Jenny, who is already past thirty, has left behind a trail of men, like that girl in the song. Jenny has lived with a couple of men, here and there. Opal can’t keep track of all of the men Jenny has mentioned. They have names like John and Skip and Michael. She’s not in a hurry to get married, she says. She says she is going to buy a house trailer and live in the woods like a hermit. She’s full of ideas, and she exaggerates. She uses the words “gorgeous,” “adorable,” and “wonderful” interchangeably and persistently.
Last night, Jenny was here, with her latest boyfriend, Randy Newcomb. Opal remembers when he sat in the back row in her geometry class. He was an ordinary kid, not especially smart, and often late with his lessons. Now he has a real-estate agency and drives a Cadillac. Jenny kissed him in front of Opal and told him he was gorgeous. She said the placemats were gorgeous, too.
Jenny was asking to see those old quilts again. “Why do you hide away your nice things, Aunt Opal?” she said. Opal doesn’t think they’re that nice, and she doesn’t want to have to look at them all the time. Opal showed Jenny and Randy Newcomb the double-wedding-ring quilt, the star quilt, and some of the crazy quilts, but she wouldn’t show them the craziest one—the burial quilt, the one Jenny kept asking about. Did Jenny come back home just to hunt up that old rag? The thought makes Opal shudder.
The doorbell rings. Opal has to rearrange her comforter and magazines in order to get up. Her joints are stiff. She leaves the TV blaring a song she knows, with balloons and bombs in it.
At the door is Velma Shaw, who lives in the duplex next to Opal. She has just come home from her job at Shop World. “Have you gone out of your mind, Opal?” cries Velma. She has on a plum-colored print blouse and a plum skirt and a little green scarf with a gold pin holding it down. Velma shouts, “You can hear that racket clear across the street!”
“Rock and roll is never too loud,” says Opal. This is a line from a song she has heard.
Opal releases one of her saved-up laughs, and Velma backs away. Velma is still trying to be sexy, in those little color-coordinated outfits she wears, but it is hopeless, Opal thinks with a smile. She closes the door and scoots back to her recliner.
Opal is Jenny’s favorite aunt. Jenny likes the way Opal ties her hair in a ponytail with a ribbon. She wears muumuus and socks. She is tall and only a little thick in the middle. She told Jenny that middle-age spread was caused by the ribs expanding and that it doesn’t matter what you eat. Opal kids around about “old Arthur”—her arthritis, visiting her on damp days.
Jenny has been in town six months. She works at the courthouse, typing records—marriages, divorces, deaths, drunk-driving convictions. Frequently, the same names are on more than one list. Before she returned to Kentucky, Jenny was waitressing in Denver, but she was growing restless again, and the idea of going home seized her. Her old rebellion against small-town conventions gave way to curiosity.
In the South, the shimmer of the heat seems to distort everything, like old glass with impurities in it. During her first two days there, she saw two people with artificial legs, a blind man, a man with hooks for hands, and a man without an arm. It seemed unreal. In a parking lot, a pit bull terrier in a Camaro attacked her from behind the closed window. He barked viciously, his nose stabbing the window. She stood in the parking lot, letting the pit bull attack, imagining herself in an arena, with a crowd watching. The South makes her nervous. Randy Newcomb told her she had just been away too long. “We’re not as countrified down here now as people think,” he said.
Jenny has been going with Randy for three months. The first night she went out with him, he took her to a fancy place that served shrimp flown in from New Orleans, and then to a little bar over in Hopkinsville. They went with Kathy Steers, a friend from work, and Kathy’s husband, Bob. Kathy and Bob weren’t getting along and they carped at each other all evening. In the bar, an attractive, cheerful woman sang requests for tips, and her companion, a blind man, played the guitar. When she sang, she looked straight at him, singing to him, smiling at him reassuringly. In the background, men played pool with their girlfriends, and Jenny noticed the sharp creases in the men’s jeans and imagined the women ironing them. When she mentioned it, Kathy said she took Bob’s jeans to the laundromat to use the machine there that puts knifelike creases in them. The men in the bar had two kinds
of women with them: innocent-looking women with pastel skirts and careful hairdos, and hard-looking women without makeup, in T-shirts and jeans. Jenny imagined that each type could be either a girlfriend or a wife. She felt odd. She was neither type. The singer sang “Happy Birthday” to a popular regular named Will Ed, and after the set she danced with him, while the jukebox took over. She had a limp, as though one leg were shorter than the other. The leg was stiff under her jeans, and when the woman danced Jenny could see that the leg was not real.
“There, but for the grace of God, go I,” Randy whispered to Jenny. He squeezed her hand, and his heavy turquoise ring dug into her knuckle.
“Those quilts would bring a good price at an estate auction,” Randy says to Jenny as they leave her aunt’s one evening and head for his real-estate office. They are in his burgundy Cadillac. “One of those star quilts used to bring twenty-five dollars. Now it might run three hundred.”
“My aunt doesn’t think they’re worth anything. She hides all her nice stuff, like she’s ashamed of it. She’s got beautiful dresser scarves and starched doilies she made years ago. But she’s getting a little weird. All she does is watch MTV.”
“I think she misses the kids,” Randy says. Then he bursts out laughing. “She used to put the fear of God in all her students! I never will forget the time she told me to stop watching so much television and read some books. It was like an order from God Almighty. I didn’t dare not do what she said. I read Crime and Punishment. I never would have read it if she hadn’t shamed me into it. But I appreciated that. I don’t even remember what Crime and Punishment was about, except there was an ax murderer in it.”
“That was basically it,” Jenny says. “He got caught. Crime and punishment—just like any old TV show.”
Randy touches some controls on the dashboard and Waylon Jennings starts singing. The sound system is remarkable. Everything Randy owns is quality. He has been looking for some land for Jenny to buy—a couple of acres of woods—but so far nothing on his listings has met with his approval. He is concerned about zoning and power lines and frontage. All Jenny wants is a remote place where she can have a dog and grow some tomatoes. She knows that what she really needs is a better car, but she doesn’t want to go anywhere.
Later, at Randy’s office, Jenny studies the photos of houses on display, while he talks on the telephone to someone about dividing up a sixty-acre farm into farmettes. His photograph is on several certificates on the wall. He has a full, well-fed face in the pictures, but he is thinner now and looks better. He has a boyish, endearing smile, like Dennis Quaid, Jenny’s favorite actor. She likes Randy’s smile. It seems so innocent, as though he would do anything in the world for someone he cared about. He doesn’t really want to sell her any land. He says he is afraid she will get raped if she lives alone in the woods.
“I’m impressed,” she says when he slams down the telephone. She points to his new regional award for the fastest-growing agency of the year.
“Isn’t that something? Three branch offices in a territory this size—I can’t complain. There’s a lot of turnover in real estate now. People are never satisfied. You know that? That’s the truth about human nature.” He laughs. “That’s the secret of my success.”
“It’s been two years since Barbara divorced me,” he says later, on the way to Jenny’s apartment. “I can’t say it hasn’t been fun being free, but my kids are in college, and it’s like starting over. I’m ready for a new life. The business has been so great, I couldn’t really ask for more, but I’ve been thinking—Don’t laugh, please, but what I was thinking was if you want to share it with me, I’ll treat you good. I swear.”
At a stoplight, he paws at her hand. On one corner is the Pepsi bottling plant, and across from it is the Broad Street House, a restaurant with an old-fashioned statue of a jockey out front. People are painting the black faces on those little statues white now, but this one has been painted bright green all over. Jenny can’t keep from laughing at it.
“I wasn’t laughing at you—honest!” she says apologetically. “That statue always cracks me up.”
“You don’t have to give me an answer now.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“I can get us a real good deal on a house,” he says. “I can get any house I’ve got listed. I can even get us a farmette, if you want trees so bad. You won’t have to spend your money on a piece of land.”
“I’ll have to think about it.” Randy scares her. She likes him, but there is something strange about his energy and optimism. Everyone around her seems to be bursting at the seams, like that pit bull terrier.
“I’ll let you think on it,” he says, pulling up to her apartment. “Life has been good to me. Business is good, and my kids didn’t turn out to be dope fiends. That’s about all you can hope for in this day and time.”
Jenny is having lunch with Kathy Steers at the Broad Street House. The iced tea is mixed with white grape juice. It took Jenny a long time to identify the flavor, and the Broad Street House won’t admit it’s grape juice. Their iced tea is supposed to have a mystique about it, probably because they can’t sell drinks in this dry county. In the daylight, the statue out front is the color of the Jolly Green Giant.
People confide in Jenny, but Jenny doesn’t always tell things back. It’s an unfair exchange, though it often goes unnoticed. She is curious, eager to hear other people’s stories, and she asks more questions than is appropriate. Kathy’s life is a tangle of deceptions. Kathy stayed with her husband, Bob, because he had opened his own body shop and she didn’t want him to start out a new business with a rocky marriage, but she acknowledges now it was a mistake.
“What about Jimmy and Willette?” Jenny asks. Jimmy and Willette are the other characters in Kathy’s story.
“That mess went on for months. When you started work at the office, remember how nervous I was? I thought I was getting an ulcer.” Kathy lights a cigarette and blows at the wall. “You see, I didn’t know what Bob and Willette were up to, and they didn’t know about me and Jimmy. That went on for two years before you came. And when it started to come apart—I mean, we had hell! I’d say things to Jimmy and then it would get back to Bob because Jimmy would tell Willette. It was an unreal circle. I was pregnant with Jason and you get real sensitive then. I thought Bob was screwing around on me, but it never dawned on me it was with Willette.”
The fat waitress says, “Is everything all right?”
Kathy says, “No, but it’s not your fault. Do you know what I’m going to do?” she asks Jenny.
“No, what?”
“I’m taking Jason and moving in with my sister. She has a sort of apartment upstairs. Bob can do what he wants to with the house. I’ve waited too long to do this, but it’s time. My sister keeps the baby anyway, so why shouldn’t I just live there?”
She puffs the cigarette again and levels her eyes at Jenny. “You know what I admire about you? You’re so independent. You say what you think. When you started work at the office, I said to myself, ‘I wish I could be like that.’ I could tell you had been around. You’ve inspired me. That’s how come I decided to move out.”
Jenny plays with the lemon slice in the saucer holding her iced-tea glass. She picks a seed out of it. She can’t bring herself to confide in Kathy about Randy Newcomb’s offer. For some reason, she is embarrassed by it.
“I haven’t spoken to Willette since September third,” says Kathy.
Kathy keeps talking, and Jenny listens, suspicious of her interest in Kathy’s problems. She notices how Kathy is enjoying herself. Kathy is looking forward to leaving her husband the same way she must have enjoyed her fling with Jimmy, the way she is enjoying not speaking to Willette.
“Let’s go out and get drunk tonight,” Kathy says cheerfully. “Let’s celebrate my decision.”
“I can’t. I’m going to see my aunt this evening. I have to take her some booze. She gives me money to buy her vodka and peppermint schnapps, and she tel
ls me not to stop at the same liquor store too often. She says she doesn’t want me to get a reputation for drinking! I have to go all the way to Hopkinsville to get it.”
“Your aunt tickles me. She’s a pistol.”
The waitress clears away the dishes and slaps down dessert menus. They order chocolate pecan pie, the day’s special.
“You know the worst part of this whole deal?” Kathy says. “It’s the years it takes to get smart. But I’m going to make up for lost time. You can bet on that. And there’s not a thing Bob can do about it.”
Opal’s house has a veranda. Jenny thinks that verandas seem to imply a history of some sort—people in rocking chairs telling stories. But Opal doesn’t tell any stories. It is exasperating, because Jenny wants to know about her aunt’s past love life, but Opal won’t reveal her secrets. They sit on the veranda and observe each other. They smile, and now and then roar with laughter over something ridiculous. In the bedroom, where she snoops after using the bathroom, Jenny notices the layers of old wallpaper in the closet, peeling back and spilling crumbs of gaudy ancient flower prints onto Opal’s muumuus.
Downstairs, Opal asks, “Do you want some cake, Jenny?”
“Of course. I’m crazy about your cake, Aunt Opal.”
“I didn’t beat the egg whites long enough. Old Arthur’s visiting again.” Opal flexes her fingers and smiles. “That sounds like the curse. Girls used to say they had the curse. Or they had a visitor.” She looks down at her knuckles shyly. “Nowadays, of course, they just say what they mean.”
The cake is delicious—an old-fashioned lemon chiffon made from scratch. Jenny’s cooking ranges from English-muffin mini-pizzas to brownie mixes. After gorging on the cake, Jenny blurts out, “Aunt Opal, aren’t you sorry you never got married? Tell the truth, now.”
Patchwork Page 11
