“Well, I wear a size eight.”
“Good, good,” Quee says. “That’s a start. If you ever have children you’ll probably make it into a nine. Just hold on to that thought; I believe in the power of positive thinking.”
“Yeah, your foot looks about the same as mine.” Tom sticks his brogan out beside Denny’s foot, and though there is a considerable difference in size he continues. “I bet we could swap shoes sometime.”
“Oh, yeah, right.” She looks up and stares at him with narrowed green eyes. Her eyes are saying go to hell, but there’s play around the mouth, the softness of the person comfortable enough to strip down and prance around in raggedy underwear. “I still want to know what you were listening to in there and where is your Walkman?”
“I’ve got to go help Ruthie shred her cancer sticks,” Quee says and eases out the door. “She’s getting hysterical, and it’s only been five minutes since she put out what I like to call the final request smoke. She was eyeing the dash of your truck there, Tom, you must have a stash scattered around in there. You’re next on my list, honey.” She points her finger at him. “I need a lot of things done around here, and if you always come in smelling of smoke, the addicts’ll be asking to suck your clothes.”
“Suck my toes?”
“She said clothes.” Denny slings back the velvet curtain and is running her hand up and over each and every shelf.
“Worse things could happen,” he says and grins, and Quee just laughs a laugh that makes the room vibrate, calls him so bad.
“I’ll get you, Tommy,” she says. “I’m gonna use you as the supreme example of the miracle of my cures.”
“I hear you.”
“Make yourself at home, Denny love.” Quee flashes that same grin, complete with the affected batting of her eyelids before closing the door.
“Yeah,” Tom says, his arms opened wide to the small cluttered room. “Make yourself at home.”
“You were spying on me,” she says now. “There’s no Walkman.” She has collected a bundle of clothes and now is holding them in front of her.
“Look,” he shakes his head and starts to walk toward her, but she takes two steps back. “I am curious about what you’re wearing. Would you call that a muumuu?”
“No, Mr. Eavesdropper, I’d call it a robe if I were to call it anything for your benefit.”
“Hmmm.” He shrugs and goes to get his toolbox out of the closet.
“Why did you ask to begin with?”
“I don’t know, just never quite saw anything like it.”
“So?” She grabs up a big hard red suitcase and slings it onto the low double bed. Just last week, Quee had had him hang a big pink velvet curtain behind the bed, with the idea that it would make the plain-as-a-jail-cell room look fancy. “I’m sure there’s a lot that you’ve never seen.”
“Seen more today than I cared to.” He laughs and extends his hand. “I’m just kidding really.”
“No, I don’t think you are kidding. I think you’re making fun of me.” She turns, holding the red satin lapels of her robe. “I mean what’s so different about my robe except that you happened to spy”—she spit the word and took a step closer—“and see what was under it.”
“Forget I said anything, really.” He goes over to the door feeling like he got the best of that one for sure, only to turn and see her with a look so forlorn he can’t take it. She looks a hell of a lot like his latest adoption, an abused cocker spaniel who answers now to Mary Read. “Really.”
“Oh, just go on.” She waves her hand and sits on the edge of the bed, legs stretched and crossed at the ankles, as she stares up at the odd overhead fixture that Quee had him install several weeks ago. It looks like a big lavender tit with a crystal pastie, again, a little accessory that Quee thought would bring elegance to the room.
“See you around,” he says, but she sits there, barely lowers her chin in response. Nothing pisses him off like this kind of silent, “pity me” reaction; he doesn’t even know her, and he’d like to put his fist through the wall. He should leave, just walk out, but he has always had such a hard time doing that. As soon as he did, she’d probably go to the closet only to have it cave in on her, decapitate her. Tom Lowe was the last one with her, they’d say.
“Look, what can I do?” He puts down his toolbox and takes one step back in the room.
“It’s not you. It has nothing to do with you.” She turns then with dry eyes and a whole new look about her. “I mean, yes, I wish you’d said you were in there looking at me without my clothes on, but you didn’t.” He wants to interject, to make a connection, to say that maybe this is reminding her of her little episode in the theater, but he thinks better of it and just stands there. “I mean it’s not like you really saw me.”
“No.” He shakes his head and laughs, a full image of her body—the narrow shoulders and waist channeling into an ample rear—is firm in his memory. Before she even has time to question his laugh, he turns with Blackbeard’s bark to look out the window where Ruthie, decked out in paisley spandex pants, is circling his truck. “Oh, you’ve got to see this,” he says. Denny comes over there beside him, her robe still pulled tightly around her. He feels strange standing this close to a stranger, so close that he can smell the lemon scent of her hair, can see the pale blue vein in her right cheek.
“The Spandex Poet?” Denny presses her forehead against the glass just as Quee comes out into the front yard, waving her arms as if herding a flock of something wild.
“I mean it, Ruthie, I’m not having this shit,” Quee says and grabs the woman’s toothpick arm. “You are an addict. If you want to quit smoking, then you can quit smoking.” Quee gives her another shake, and Ruthie starts sobbing. She flails her paisley legs and wails like a cat in heat. “I can help you, I can cure you.” Quee practically lifts her up by the elbows, her arms folded in like she’s in a straitjacket, her legs pedaling like she’s on a bicycle. “I can beat your skinny ass if necessary.”
“Man, she’s crazy as hell,” Denny says and backs away so that her breath on the glass won’t interrupt the view.
“You got that right.” Tom taps her on the arm, leans in close enough to whisper in her ear. “And you’re her doctor.”
“What will I do with her?”
“I think that everybody in this town has asked that question at least once.”
“Really?”
“Really.” He waits for her to say something else but there’s just an uncomfortable silence. “Well, see you.”
“In the clinic?” she asks and follows him to the door.
“Don’t count on it.” He’s all set to go, but he finds himself taking the time to check her out from head to toe, the thick frizzy hair yanked back with a big yellow hair thing, those green cat eyes, the smooth near-flatness of her chest, no cleavage whatsoever as she pulls her robe tighter.
“What are you looking at?” she asks now, and in the background, from the other end of the house they can hear Ruthie’s dramatic swearing to quit smoking, with Quee egging her on every step of the way.
“Something behind that preposition.”
“Oh, smart. You’re so smart.”
“Yes, I am. Very smart.”
“And that’s why you’re hanging curtains in a two-bit hodgepodge clinic.” She twisted her shoulders as she spoke, a gesture he remembered girls doing in grade school; it was the physical movement that went along with nanny-nanny-boo-boo.
“Yes, the very clinic where you are the resident shrink, if I understand right.” He stepped back into the room and closed the door. “Are we talking quality? Do you really want to?” He stares up at that lavender tit with the crystal pastie and catches himself picturing such adornments fastened to her. “Because you know I grew up here, my mom is here.”
“So?”
“So, I didn’t choose it. I’m part of it.” He pats his chest. “You chose it.”
“Well if you were any good at what you do then you would have had
opportunity to leave.” He laughs, waits to see if it occurs to her what she’s just said.
“Oh, I’m good.” He grins. “Anyone will tell you that.”
Queen Mary Stutts was born in Fulton in 1925, the same year that her father, Seymore Stutts, an employer of the local ice plant, left home. She had never even seen a picture of the man, though people said she looked a lot like him, that she got his big bones, Greek complexion, and wiry black hair. Her mother refused to talk about him, saying only that he had taken shape and then dissolved, much like the blocks of ice he heaved and chipped with his cold metal hook. They were once told there was a woman in the next town, a married woman he ran off with, but the story stopped there. Her mother married Mr. Bradley when Quee was thirteen, and he was never like a daddy at all, more like an uncle or a neighbor. It was right after her mother married him that he took Quee (then Mary) to see the ocean for the very first time.
By the time she was fifteen, she had begun to call herself “Quee,” much to her mother’s dislike, and was anxious to go ahead and get married so she could get Stutts out of her name and move on to something new. The man she found was quite a bit older, Lonnie Purdy, the new church officer (an accountant by profession), who was known for his singing and his ability to speak Hebrew. Quee would whisper in his ear, beg him to speak some Hebrew to her. She said the word, stretching the last syllable so it sounded dirty. She had her mind on that name, Purdy, which she fully intended to have and one day change to pronounce as Pur-day, like a French name: Quee Purdé. Lonnie didn’t get it, but he never had gotten anything, nothing, and when Quee pulled him down into the church basement on the pretense of finding some extra hymnals, when she pressed up against him in the dark musty closet, velvet costumes from some kind of pageant, her breath tinged with the licorice she was forever chewing (she liked to braid the strips and tie them around her neck like a choker), he started to catch on. She felt her way down his thigh, the crease in his pants so sharp it made her laugh to think of him or some old woman over at his boardinghouse spitting on an iron and pinching the fabric up that way. She reached for him, palm spread and pressed down in circular strokes. Behind her she could hear people coming down the stairs, everybody getting ready for Snak and Yak, stale sandwiches and room-temperature milk. “Let’s have our own Snak and Yak,” she whispered, his face as smooth as a baby, his starched pants stretching at the seams. “Church man, minister to me, oh save me, save me.” She giggled and peeked out into the darkened basement.
“What has come over you, Quee?” he was asking. “What is it you need?”
“You don’t get out much, do you?” She undid his belt buckle and slowly teased with his zipper. “Let’s get you out for a spell.” He closed his eyes at her touch, pretending like maybe nothing was happening. “Now talk some Hebrew or Greek,” she said coaxingly. “Come on, now. Everybody’s always bragging on you, I just want to hear it for myself.”
“Quee, why me? What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking I want to marry you. I want to get my naked body right beside you. I want to,” she leaned into his neck and whispered. He strained to hear her every word and then turned suddenly and pulled her to the back of the closet where they stretched out on the cold hard floor. He moved on top of her, his hard shiny shoes tapping out a beat on the wall where there was a stack of tin basins and towels that had recently been discarded when the church women decided that their Wednesday night footwashings were archaic and should be replaced with a potluck dinner instead. Quee had once taken her mama’s dark gray stockings and rubbed them in the fireplace soot so that when her mama got to church and rolled off the hose her feet were filthy. She was thinking about that, her mama coming home in a wave of fury with black splotches all up and down her white skinny legs, when Lonnie’s breath became shallow and whimpery like a puppy. She felt his total weight on her then, and it felt good, like a flesh-and-bone blanket, a body of substance. “What have I done?” he asked after a few minutes. They were both suddenly aware of voices and lights in the basement, the women—her mama one of them—slapping those old stale sandwiches together.
“Looks to me like you might’ve proposed.” Quee pulled out from under him and adjusted the waistband of her skirt. She pulled a piece of licorice from around her throat and popped it in her mouth. “I guess I’ll give you an answer later on. And,” she lowered her voice as if to issue a threat, teeth clenched. “I want to hear some of that Hebrew people have been bragging on you about.”
Years later, she teased him about the look of horror on his face. She teased him about his modesty and the way that he would carefully remove and roll his socks, fold and tuck his briefs under his undershirt. One year of marriage and she talked him into leaving his post at the church and taking what she called “a job with a future,” a job at the First Southern Savings and Loan. “People trust you,” she told him. “People think you know some superior things.”
“Speaking of which,” he said. “How do you know all that you know?” It was a question he had asked often. “How did you know so much way back in the church basement?”
“I read a lot,” she said. “And aren’t you glad I do?”
Those years with Lonnie were some of the best, and even though the spark between them flared and sputtered off and on (at least as far as she was concerned), she could never have found a nicer person to set up shop with. He knew there had been other men, and he knew there would be after him. He knew that he had always been her sturdy stake in the yard, a father and a brother and a friend, a mouthpiece for the divine to get people off of her back. There were all kinds of rumors about her and what she did. People said she was a witch. People said she was a whore. Even now that she is known as a fully licensed massage therapist, people are still suspicious. The local chiropractor feels she’s treading on his turf, and people around still seem to think that “massage” is a buzzword for blow job. She told a group of busybodies not three days ago that she was not in the business of giving lip service (Do you get it? Lip service? They were all in the checkout of the Winn-Dixie) to anybody. She said if somebody came to her looking for a blow job that she’d tell him to go straight to hell. She is a busy, busy woman, a business woman on the threshhold of a huge venture, and she didn’t have time to help their tired old men get their rocks off.
“She’s as wicked as ever,” they said. “I don’t know how she ever got such a nice man as Lonnie Purdy, rest in peace, to marry her.”
“I am sixty-nine years old, ladies, and I was the best thing to ever happen to Lonnie Purdy.” Quee held her arms out to the side, an avocado in each hand, and turned. “I look fifty-two. Your husbands like to look at me or did when they were alive. They always did. Those still breathing like to stop off at the shop and talk, get a massage or psychofoot therapy, which is something I invented myself after being inspired by the book Feet First, which was written by Laura Norman, the cousin of one of my dearest friends. I am a great reader, ladies; I’m a philosopher and I’m an inventor and now I’m curing the smokers. The people are coming in from near and far. I’ve had to hire a helper, that’s how many reservations I’m getting. So . . .” She put her avocados on the conveyer belt along with a cartful of produce and several bottles of wine. “So, if any of your men take on a lean and hungry look, well you just better think long and hard about offering him a little massage yourself.” She pulled her sunglasses down and watched while the fruit and vegetables tumbled down the belt. “You know I did once know a whore,” she told them. “She taught me a lot of things, but none of what you’re thinking. She had a big blank wall behind her dirty rumpled bed, and she’d reach up and make a little mark every time she screwed somebody. It was her tally card. She was a business woman, and she was proud of it.” She started to tell them the whole truth that this woman who had taught her so much was none other than her own alter ego, fantasy self, but she didn’t. It was enough that she had shocked them, enough that she had left them feeling dowdy and old, pinched in their little
stiff clothes, their faces pasty with makeup, their hair lacquered in place.
“You’ll get arrested one day,” one of them said.
“For what, sugar? Servicing the underprivileged, or killing somebody I don’t like?”
Mack knew all about TomCat Lowe, or at least all that Sarah was willing to tell him. Maybe she told him all that there was, and yet still it always felt that there was something left out. Tom Lowe was the person who would haunt Mack’s marriage. Mack had even considered turning down his father-in-law’s job proposal just because the mysterious Tommy Lowe lived in the same town.
What he knew was that Sarah had slept with him, that she got pregnant when she was a senior in high school. She never would have told Mack that, he was sure, except that it was her bit of proof that she could get pregnant. For some reason, she seemed never to have thought about how this might make him feel; she had so taken the responsibility onto her own shoulders that she had never even considered that Mack might be the problem. She clung to the doctor’s notion that she needed to calm down, relax, be patient. That’s when she talked of the irony of it all; she told Mack how scared she had been when she realized she was pregnant. For hours she had sat perched there on the white canopy bed that is still in her room at her parents’ home. A yellow-and-white panda bear won by Tom Lowe with skeeball tickets at the Ocean Drive pavilion is still on the window seat. She said that Tom took care of everything, that he promised her that no one would ever know. She trusted him completely, even after she was off at school and things didn’t work out between them.
Then she met Mack. They were introduced to each other by Jones Jameson, a fraternity brother of Mack’s. They had dated for a whole semester before they both admitted that they hated Jones Jameson (in college he had given himself the nickname Moby) and hadn’t said anything because each had assumed the other was his friend. He was the kind who made it sound like everyone was his friend, which is exactly how he had always managed to come out on top, whether it was cheating on a college exam or being “the cool” disc jockey in a very small town. He did it as soon as Mack got to town, slapped him on the back with his old buddy talk only to ask five minutes later for a little free legal advice. The one bit of knowledge that keeps him from hating Tom Lowe is the story Sarah told about Tom Lowe beating the shit out of Jones Jameson in the eighth grade and again in the ninth. The current rumor in town is that Jones Jameson has left his wife, disappeared; the response that first comes to mind is Good riddance to bad rubbish and all those other little sayings that June has recently brought back into his life, compliments of the elementary school where she teaches.
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