“Mm-hmm.” Tante Pearl was now leaning her backside against the counter, just as curious as the rest of us.
“So what if we get ourselves in that locker room while they’re running their laps. Don’t you know Doug plays catcher, and you know a catcher always wears himself one of those plastic thingamajigs over his southern parts.”
Tante Pearl had her arms folded over her bosom and got to laughing, kind of slow and easy at first, but then her whole body was shaking. She took that bottle of Tabasco sauce and planted it on the table in front of Evie.
Evie and I got to laughing, too. Mary Jordan didn’t get it.
“You’ve been thinking how Doug might want you to light his fire,” Evie told her. “Well, now’s your chance.”
It didn’t take but one hair-split second for all four of us to laugh our ribs crooked. Then Evie snorted, and we got to laughing even harder.
The game was five nights away.
“What time does it start?” Tante Pearl wanted to know.
“Seven,” Evie said.
“This is one game I don’t want to miss,” she said.
Then the four of us got to laughing some more.
Cayenne Peppers
Lily Dawn. That’s my mom. She always thought her name sounded like a brand of laundry detergent, until Daddy walked into her life. She and Daddy met at a crawfish fest over in Beaufort her senior year in high school. The next week he drove to Sweetbay to take her out, showing up at her door with a bouquet of lilies and yellow roses. She says her name has suited her just fine ever since.
Mama is beautiful, with shoulder-length black hair as straight and shiny as fine silk. She parts it on the side and tucks it behind her ears, making her look both young and smart. Since I’m the only child she or Daddy ever had, she managed to keep her small waist, and over the years added just a pound or two to her hips. I get my long legs from Mama, and my long neck, only I’m a lot taller than she is. By the time I hit eighth grade, the kids at school couldn’t decide whether to call me a beanstalk or the Jolly Green Giant.
Depending upon her mood, Mama can sing like Linda Ronstadt or Patsy Cline. She still has her record player from when she was a young. Still has her forty-fives and albums, too. I’ve listened to Linda Ronstadt and Patsy Cline, and others like Crystal Gayle and Barbara Mandrell, since I was born. When I was a baby, Mama set her record player up next to my crib, thinking all those ladies’ talents might make me musically inclined. They didn’t.
Mama is the music teacher over at the elementary school. In the afternoons and throughout the summer, she teaches piano lessons out of our house. When I walked into the living room after Tante Pearl dropped me off, Mama was sitting at the piano playing a duet of “Alloutté” with one of her students, Amy Dupris.
Still dressed in a towel, I snuck past them and headed upstairs to take a shower. But when I stepped out of the bathroom, my long black hair combed back from my face, and my body wrapped in my pink terry-cloth robe, it wasn’t Amy whom I heard playing the piano anymore. I wasn’t sure it was Mama, either. I walked quietly down the staircase and across the entry hall to the living room. Mama wasn’t sitting at the piano. She was standing with her shoulders pressed against the wall, her eyes closed, while her hips swayed from side to side. Sitting on the piano bench with his back to me was a boy who looked about my age, with a head full of thick blond curls.
He just kept on playing, and Mama just kept on standing there with her eyes closed and her hips swaying like the tire swing behind our house.
Mama says there are people who play music and people who make music, just like love, and from what I could tell, this boy was making some mighty fine sounds. I turned and climbed the stairs, the boy’s music following me like a hot flame running down my spine. Mama had never had anyone that good before. Most of her pupils were students of hers from school who were still trying to play “Jingle Bells,” even though it was summer, or else women from the church who hadn’t yet mastered “Salve Regina.”
I lay on my bed and listened. After he finished, Mama and he started talking, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. A couple of minutes later, I heard their footsteps in the entrance hall. I scrambled off the bed and hurried over to the window in the dormer. Below me, the door opened and shut. The boy walked down our brick path between Mama’s turquoise irises. Mama is the only person in the entire state of Louisiana to grow turquoise irises. Southern Living magazine said so. They did a full-page article on Mama’s flowers in their July issue two years back.
On account of the giant oak tree in front of my window, I couldn’t see his face. Just the top of his thick hair. From my vantage point, he didn’t look very tall, but I decided that was just because of my being up so high.
I dressed in a pair of cutoff shorts and a T-shirt, tied my wet hair up in a knot, and joined Mama downstairs in the kitchen. I wanted to ask her about her new student, but I wasn’t sure I should. Knowing Mama, she’d take it upon herself to set me up with him. She used to tell me not to worry when the boys didn’t call. She said I was a late bloomer. I didn’t think I was such a late bloomer. I just thought I’d bloomed way too tall, like a giant sunflower. Last time Mama planted sunflowers in her garden, come fall she’d had to cut down their tall stalks with a handsaw. But the older I got, the more convinced I was that Mama thought she was Saint Valentine reincarnated.
Not long after Tommy moved, Mama tried to set me up with Ms. Pitre’s grandson, who had come down to visit from Birmingham, Alabama. His name was Justin. Mama had the notion in her head that he would bring some culture to my life, seeing how he was from a big city. So one day, she took it upon herself to write Justin a letter:
Dear Justin,
There is a girl living in Sweetbay named Lucy Beauregard. She has long, flowing black hair and walks with the grace of a gazelle. You are to seek her out. Her telephone number is 933-3195.
Sincerely,
God
Mama believed in divine intervention. But she said sometimes God needed a little help. I guess the fear of the Lord hadn’t come to Justin yet, because not only did he never call, his grandmother showed the letter to everyone she knew, which in a small town like ours was no different than hiring the Goodyear Blimp.
No, I was fairly certain I shouldn’t bring up the topic of Mama’s new student. I’d let Mama introduce the topic herself. She was standing at the counter frying crabcakes Lisette and singing along to Billie Holiday on the stereo. Mama liked to cook. She said cooking was like life. With the right ingredients, it could be quite an affair. She said eating was like life, too. You could wash it down in a hurry, or you could savor every bite.
“How was the beach?” Mama asked when she saw me.
“Okay,” I said. I wasn’t about to tell her about Evie and Mary Jordan’s and my naked ride to Tante Pearl’s. She’d have me in church the very next day confessing indecent exposure.
I started taking down dishes from the cupboards to set the table.
“A new family moved to town,” Mama told me. “Mm-hmm. He’s an artist,” she went on to say.
“Who?”
“Moved here from Detroit.”
I closed the cupboard and turned around, my back against the counter. “Who moved here from Detroit?”
“He’s a widower. His name’s Victor Savoi. Moved down here with his son. Says he’s opening up an art gallery in town. Going to offer lessons, too.”
Mama turned the patties over in the skillet with one hand as she layered paper towels onto a plate with the other. “I told him I taught school.”
Tante Pearl once said that listening to Mama tell a story was like milking a cow with a bad teat. By the time she finished, you weren’t sure whether to cry or get drunk.
I leaned over the stove and turned off the burner. Then I grabbed Mama by the wrist and pulled her over to one of the upholstered chairs in the corner of the room. I sat in the one caddy-cornered to her. Grandma Sissy called them our oven chairs. Said every wom
an needed a comfortable chair in her kitchen to take the weight off her feet once her dish was in the oven. As long as I could remember, Mama had had two oven chairs in the kitchen on account of there being two women in the house. I didn’t like to cook. But Mama said that didn’t matter. She didn’t like to be alone, so the two chairs worked out just fine.
“Dewey came by this afternoon,” she went on to say. She lifted her eyes to the ceiling as if she was going to recite a prayer. “Lucy,” she said, letting out a sigh long and deep. “The Lord smiled upon me today.” She held her palms flat across her chest as if she were about to swoon. Mama was always acting dramatic to emphasize whatever point she was wanting to make. The Lord smiled upon her a lot, too. At least she seemed to think he did.
About that time, Daddy walked through the back door, having just gotten home from work. “Lily,” he said the minute he stepped into the kitchen, “have you seen my golf shoes? I left them right by the door.”
Daddy wears Levis and white starched shirts. He has black, wavy hair he styles straight back from his face, and blue eyes, and drives a BMW motorcycle the five blocks to and from work.
“Yes, you left them by the door,” Mama told him. “Where I stepped on them and almost broke my neck.”
“So where are they?” Daddy wanted to know.
Mama hesitated before speaking. “Well, I couldn’t decide whether to put them in the trash can or upstairs in your closet. But in the end, God gave me a benevolent heart.”
“I’ll be sure to thank Him,” Daddy said. He walked through the kitchen, noticing me for the first time.
“How was the beach?” he asked.
“Okay,” I said.
Then he continued on his way to the stairs.
Two things my daddy seemed to care for more than anything in the world were his golf clubs and his motorcycle, and I suppose that afternoon, his golf shoes, as well. When he wasn’t working down at his flower and gift shop, he was soaking up the sun on the greens of Sweetbay’s public golf course, or else taking his motorcycle for a spin along Louisiana’s country roads.
He hadn’t always been that way. There seemed to be a time not too far back in my memory when Mama played just as big a part in his life as his other two interests. They’d watch TV together or go for walks. Sometimes he’d even help her in the kitchen. I would never forget the night when I’d come upon the two of them on the porch. I wasn’t more than ten years old. Evie and I’d been sleeping over at Mary Jordan’s. After Mary Jordan threw up half the pecan brittle we’d eaten, Evie and I decided to go back to our own houses. No sooner had I turned the corner to our yard than I’d seen Mama and Daddy lying together in the chaise lounge, the light of the full moon falling over their naked bodies like gossamer. I ducked behind the hedges and crept around to the front of the house, my heart flip-flopping in my chest and my skin as hot as a waffle iron.
“What about supper?” Mama hollered at him as soon as he came back through the kitchen with his golf shoes in his hands.
“I’ll warm up a plate when I get home,” he said, his last word leaving with him as he shut the door.
Daddy was always warming up his supper plate. I thought by now, Mama would have gotten used to it.
“So,” I said, wanting to bring her back to her earlier story. “Who’s Dewey?”
“Didn’t I tell you?”
I shook my head.
“Oh,” she said. “Well, I was in the grocery store, and this man I’d never seen before was standing in the produce aisle for the longest time. I wasn’t sure if he was confused or was just trying to cool himself off. You know, sometimes people will do that when it’s hot outside. Stand in the produce section or the freezer aisle to refresh themselves on a summer day.”
I sat back in the chair, dangling my legs over one of the arms, then nudged Mama in the side with my foot. “Back to the story, Mama.”
“Well, since I wasn’t sure whether he was confused or just trying to refresh himself, I decided the Christian thing to do would be to see if he needed any help. So, I said, ‘Excuse me, sir, are you just hot, or do you need some assistance?’”
“What did he say?”
“He said he was trying to make some Creole vegetable soup and couldn’t seem to find the cayenne peppers. I told him any kind of pepper other than a bell pepper was in the Heat Wave section a couple of aisles over. He said he was new to town and would I be so kind as to show him where that might be.”
“And being the Christian woman that you are …,” I prompted her.
“Well, of course. So I led him to the cayenne peppers, and as we got to talking, he told me he had just moved to town from Detroit with his son, Dewey. While he was trying to decide which pepper to buy, I asked him if he liked to cook, and he said, ‘I guess I’m going to have to now that my wife has passed on.’”
“That’s terrible,” I said.
“Mm-hmm, I thought so, too. He went on to tell me about his son playing music. I told him I taught piano lessons. He told me about the new gallery he was opening in town. He said he was going to be offering art classes. Well, you know how I’ve always been interested in art.”
“Since when?”
Mama swatted her hand in the air. “Well, I have, I just might have forgotten to mention it. Mr. Savoi and I got to talking, and I started thinking that maybe I could teach him how to make a few dishes, seeing as how food’s always been a passion of mine. You know they all go together. Kind of like the four food groups. A meal just isn’t complete if you leave one of them out.”
“What all goes together?” I asked.
“Well, you know, the four big ones: music, art, food, and sex. They’re all part of the same pie, and a woman should make sure each piece is the same size. That is, a grown woman, of course,” she said, giving me one of her direct looks. “Someone who is married.”
I got the point.
“Well, I got to thinking,” Mama continued; “my pie’s kind of lopsided. I have about as much art in my life as Father Ivan has sex.”
I tried hard to ignore her last comment. “What about the son?” I reminded her.
“Dewey?”
“Mm-hmm.”
Mama got that same dreamy look I’d seen on her face when I came home from the beach. “He came here wanting lessons. No sooner did I hear him play than I knew I was in the hands of a genuine prodigy. Oh, Lucy, the hands on that boy, and the passion.” She clutched her fist over her bosom. “That boy doesn’t need help from the likes of me. He played Brahms and Beethoven and Bach. Then he moved into opera as if it was his native tongue. The Marriage of Figaro, Tristan and Isolde, Madame Butterfly. I’ve never had to turn a student down before, but that’s just what I did. I told him he should start playing for folks around town, share his gift with the world. Yes, Lucy, the good Lord smiled on me indeed.”
My mama had just delivered herself one of her finest tributes. I’d never seen her so taken with a person my age. His playing had absolutely swooned her into a rapturous silence. And although I had never shared as passionate an appreciation for music as my mama, he’d caught my attention, as well, not to mention, this boy wasn’t from Sweetbay. He was from somewhere far away.
The Big, Bad Wolf
For the past twenty years, Daddy’s owned Straight from the Heart, a floral and gift shop smack dab in the center of town on Main Street. A couple of years ago, he brought in Ethel Lee Mabree as his partner, and nothing’s been the same since. Ethel Lee moved to Sweetbay from New Orleans, looking for a simpler way of life. She’s a little woman with big breasts, high heels, and short hair the color of cranberries. First thing she did when she joined Daddy was give the place a facelift. She painted the walls fluorescent pink, added a green-and-white awning off the storefront window, and planted all kinds of bright petunias in a cow trough she’d situated along the sidewalk. Instead of ceramic pots and get-well cards, Ethel Lee filled the shelves with potpourri and bath salts and romantic CDs. She sold candles with names like Eros Vine an
d Summer Sensation and Tender Lavender. Before long, she’d devoted half of the shop to her passionate notions.
“It’s a Love Affair,” she called the new line. With the influx of customers, Daddy didn’t seem to mind. In fact, he started getting rather original himself. He stopped tuning into 107.6 Jubilation on the shop stereo and began playing all kinds of classical music by people like Vivaldi and Chopin and Schubert. In the mornings he offered his customers chicory cappuccino, and in the afternoons he poured glasses of Chablis.
At first Mama wasn’t too surprised by Daddy’s new way of thinking. She said everybody needs a little salt in their shaker from time to time to keep the sediment out. But when Daddy and Ethel Lee started selling fancy underwear and sexy negligees, Mama felt sure he’d had himself a midlife crisis.
Daddy and Ethel Lee didn’t stop there. No sooner did they start selling lingerie than Ethel Lee began giving free makeover consultations, offering customers her own line of Amour Cosmetics, including a mélange of gourmet lip glosses. Women would get their faces made over. Then they’d sip their coffee or Chablis and watch Daddy arrange some pretty bouquet of flowers. It seemed like every woman from the age of sixteen to eighty-five was visiting their premises on a regular basis.
In the summers, Daddy hired me to make deliveries and do whatever else needed getting done. I’d ride my bicycle the five blocks to town, then lock it to an old fence post between the shop and Bessie Faye’s Creole in the Mornin’ Diner. Bessie Faye always left her back door open, and there wasn’t anything better than starting off my day with a whiff of her chau-rice sausage and creole coffee and shrimp beignets. Mama often said folks don’t know the meaning of living until they’ve experienced one of Bessie Faye’s shrimp beignets.
It was a Tuesday morning. A couple of days had passed since Doug swiped Evie’s and Mary Jordan’s and my clothes and I’d found my mama being swooned to kingdom come. “The help has arrived,” Ethel Lee whooped as I let in a gust of warm air through the back door.
Love, Cajun Style Page 3
