Carolina Moon

by Jill McCorkle

  “Jones!” June takes a long sip of her wine and sits down on the step beside him. They always end up here, on the steps, as if the swing, the rockers are too close to the house, too close to the open window. “I told Sarah that this is just what we’ve waited for since junior high, that maybe somebody has left him out in the woods without his clothes.”

  “What?”

  “You know what he did in college.” June nudges him now, a little too hard. “God, everybody heard that sick story. He told it a zillion times. I’m surprised he didn’t take out an ad in the newspaper.”

  “You knew?” He watches her face to see if they’re talking about the same thing. “About the black girl.”

  “Yes. And the white girl, and the red girl and the pink and green girl. It just so happens that the black girl has a name: Karen. Karen Stallings. She lived in my dorm freshman year. She trusted him because he told her what great friends of his Sarah and I were.”

  “Sarah knew?”

  “Of course Sarah knew.” June reaches for the wine bottle and refills her glass. “As a matter of fact,” she gets up and goes and stands right in front of Sarah’s window, leans against the ledge as if she is speaking for both of them, together, united. “That’s why Sarah finally asked you point-blank what you thought of Jones, remember?” June takes a big drink. “It was a test.”

  “A test?”

  “Yes. If you had said that you really liked Jones, that you thought he was a great guy, then she was going to break up with you.”

  “That easily? She was just going to break up that easily? I could have broken up with her for the same thing.”

  “But you didn’t.” June takes the rocker closest to the window and sits. There is a tension between them that he hasn’t felt before, and he’s not sure why. “And you never even tried to find out what she thought. You’re one of those people who waits to see what someone else will say first.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as . . .” She waves her free hand out to the side. “Such as you always wait for me to say how I miss her. You always wait for me to wonder what she’s thinking, if she’s thinking.”

  “Like I don’t?” He needs to stand up, to pace. “She’s my wife, June. I do think about things. Nobody told me that I had to run it all by you.” He goes and opens the screen door, the hinges whining in one long pitch. “I don’t know what’s happened to you all of a sudden, but I’m sorry. I’m really sorry if I did it.” He goes in and lets the door slam, turns down the hall and stands in the doorway to their room; he is shocked by Sarah’s thin silent presence, as if he’s seeing her for the first time. The room is almost dark now and the glow of the circular nightlights light up the baseboards that Sarah had scrubbed with Spic & Span the last day. The lights are hazy in his vision, blurry, like underwater lights in a pool. He would love nothing better than for her to open her eyes now, as if on command, and call him to her. She would lift her head, turning toward the window, and she would say, “June? June, come on and make up now,” as if they were children, the way she had done the time Mack got mad at June for knowing about the miscarriage before he did. Does she hear him? Does she see him here in the doorway? Is she locked there and waiting, forced to watch life as it continues to happen without her, or is she really gone?

  “Mack?”

  The whisper startles him and he rushes forward to the bed, leans close so that he can see her face, feel her breath, warm stale breath. He is about to call her name, scream her name when he realizes his error. It is June, there on the other side of the window whispering. He backs away from the bed, back to where he had been by the door. He pretends not to hear her, even when he hears her rocker tip against the wall, hears the door open and close, feels her hand on his back.

  “Mack, I’m sorry.”

  He nods, refusing to look at her.

  “Sometimes I just feel so lost, so lonely,” she whispers, her hand still lightly circling his back. “And then I feel angry, and I don’t know why. I’m sad and I’m furious. Like what Sarah and I would call ‘on the rag.’ ‘PMS City.’ Like I could squeeze the life out of somebody, kick a dog, curse a nun.”

  “Curse a nun?” he turns now, forcing the bemused look that would have accompanied that question, the question Sarah surely would have asked in all of that. “You don’t even know a nun.”

  “That’s very good,” she says and nods over at Sarah. “You gave the perfect answer. You win the prize.” She is avoiding his eyes, staring into his neck, her eyes watering, voice hoarse. Sarah once told him how when she and June were dancers in a local little theater version of Oklahoma, they were told to look adoringly into their dance partners’ (old square-dancing men from the next town) faces, and June told her partner that she would have to look adoringly at his chin, that there was no other way she could do it.

  “Are you looking adoringly at my chin?” he asks now and she steps forward, wraps her arms around him and squeezes. He can feel her shaking with stifled cries. He holds her, waits, his own hand now circling her back, combing through her hair. He turns his head so that his mouth is near her ear, those huge earrings she wears (the ones Sarah teased her about saying they were cheap and gaudy) getting in his way. “And what is the prize?” he whispers. It’s like that game he remembers playing as a child: freeze, unfreeze. He waits, not wanting to turn and look at Sarah, not wanting to turn and look at June. And in the wait he feels her press a little closer than before; he feels her breath on his cheek. “I wish,” she whispers, or it seems like she whispers. I wish.

  “What? Tell me,” he breathes back but the only response is that again she presses closer, and for a minute he almost forgets where he is, his hands squeezing and rubbing her waist, his heart skipping beats like a worn-out record.

  “I wish I could, Mack. God, I wish I could.”

  Testing . . . yoo-hoo. Day one has almost come to a close, and now I’m all locked up in this room that makes me feel like I ought to be in a brothel, all these velvet drapes and spangly light fixtures. It’s what you might call faux whorehouse. I mean, when you get right down to it, a really serious whore would need a better bed than the one I’m sitting on. I think it must’ve been left out in the rain a few times; it slopes off to one side and squeaks if you breathe. Anyway, I checked to make sure that Quee hadn’t left a nugget (pecan, peach pit, golfball) of some sort or another under my mattress like she did Ruthie Crow’s. She told me that she had always done that her whole life, at least since she read “The Princess and the Pea”; she said most people never notice that it’s there, which makes her able to honestly say that fairy tales do come true.

  “It’s just something I do, honey,” she said and laughed. She has a way of saying “honey” that makes you feel like she’s up to something. “Let’s just call it a hobby. I am a woman of many hobbies.”

  “Better peas and nuts under mattresses than a cage full of children you’re planning to eat, or spindles for people to prick their fingers on, I guess.”

  “Right, right,” she said, tapping her pen on the table where she was writing out a chart of when I would hold my sessions. I might as well have been invisible. She might have a cage full of children, who knows? I know nothing about this place except that Gerald would be sneezing his fool head off with all the dust motes and balls and bunnies to be found. Right now I am feeling a teeny bit shaky, like I’m wondering exactly what it is I am doing. And that guy, Tom, who was here making my closet. Well, I try, but I can’t seem to stop thinking of him; I mean, who could forget after what I went through in this very room? I can close my eyes and smell exactly how he smelled standing there next to me. His skin smelled hot, but in a good way, a clean suntan lotion kind of way that I found almost as exciting as William Hurt all perspired and listening to those wind chimes. And he’s got a wonderful face, tan and smooth. He’s taller than you might think if you saw him sitting down somewhere. He’s lean but sturdy-looking, and he could not take his eyes off of my robe. I finally said, “So fi
ll your eyes full, and then fill your pockets!”

  “Sorry.” He was about to leave for the second time (the first time he was telling me how good he is at what he does, like I might be fool enough to bite that hook), and it was odd but (like that first time) I didn’t want him to.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “Just tell me what it is, like am I green or something? Do I smell bad? Or is it that you can’t take your eyes off of me?”

  “The last one.”

  “Really?” I was believing him, and then he seemed to want to laugh. “What?” I said, “Come on, I need a good laugh. Really. I can take it. Hell, I just left a husband. Five years of my life sucked right down the tubes.”

  “It’s nothing.” He was acting like he wanted to leave, but I knew better, so I grabbed him by the shirtsleeve and pulled him back in. I closed the door.

  “Was there ever a Walkman?”

  “No.”

  “So you heard what all I said?”

  “Yes.” He looked me square in the eye as he said all of this, and I felt myself start to perspire.

  “And you saw me in my underwear?”

  “Yes.” He tried to step away but I blocked the door. “But I tried not to stare.”

  “Why?” I tell this all on tape as an exercise to understand exactly what it was I was thinking. “You didn’t want to see me?”

  “I don’t think there’s a right answer to this.”

  Quee had talked this guy up from the moment I arrived. She had said how handsome and smart and what a sweet boy. She had said that she had wished for the longest time that he would get together with her assistant, Alicia, who, to the best of my knowledge, is married and also is about the mousiest thing I have encountered. I could send her flying with one flick of a finger. I think he’s kind of handsome. I wouldn’t vote for him over Harrison Ford, say, and for that matter I might not vote for him over Lincoln Preston, who I loved in high school. And yet, he’s the kind of man who has this air about him, really, pheromones I think they’re called, little chemical critters that make a dust mote look big, and yet they are some kind of powerful these pheromones, especially the kind this guy has that seem to say sex, sex, sex. People have said that I have quite a case of these pheromones myself, and I could feel my pores exuding that intangible scent as we stood side by side and watched Quee muscle Ruthie back into the house with the promise of a double martini and a full body massage. It was like a scene in a book, where I thought in that instant he was going to rip my robe from my shoulders and whisper what he wanted to do to me. I’m not saying the exact words even though I should be dead when you hear all of this. The “f” word is not one that comes to me easily in a sexual sense. Now isn’t that peculiar. It seems to me that might merit an academic study. Who can and who can’t. Now for example I can say, “Oh, fuck, I burned up the dinner,” or I might read an article about somebody in politics or somebody in academics like somebody I know and say, “What a fuck-up,” but when it gets right down to the nitty-gritty, when it’s time to tango, I can’t say it. I have to like say, “Do it” or “You know.” Well, maybe they don’t know; I think that’s a big problem out there in our society, all these people who think they do know, only they don’t know. And here was this good-looking handyman standing before me, and I just knew that he was going to turn suddenly and take me, take me, take me. He was building up to it. He asked me if I had anything to drink, which of course I don’t. I am someone who gave up liquor and I told him so.

  “You don’t like it?”

  “No, I do like it,” I said. “I like it too much. And I’m quite good at drinking it, better than most I’d say.”

  “Alcoholic?” For somebody who had been so quiet he was all of a sudden busting at the seams with things to say.

  “No. But I coulda been, so I decided to beat the odds,” I told him. “I gave it up for Lent.”

  “Catholic?” he asked, and of course I shook my head, and he had to go on and show his smarts by listing others who might be inclined to go for Lent.

  “I don’t know what I am,” I said. “I grew up Methodist, and I like the idea of giving things up.”

  “Better be careful where you say such,” he said, and it took me a minute to get it. When you have lived with somebody who isn’t funny, your joke skills get a little rusty.

  “Ha, ha,” I said. “I believe in a little suffering from time to time, you know, like when you run until you think your lungs might pop? Or like when you floss your teeth really hard.”

  “You like that, huh?”

  “Maybe I do,” I said, and all the while I felt like he was locking me into something I wasn’t meaning to say. I hope I am dead if anybody hears THIS tape. I think this one might have to be labeled “Guy Lombardo Does Donny and Marie’s Greatest Hits” to be on the safe side. Anyway, then he said: “Well, maybe we can work something out.”

  I said, “Maybe we can,” and I have to say I was feeling a lot like I did in the movies that day and hating myself for it. “So back to where we were, what do you think?”

  “About?”

  “Me! What do you think of me? Now that you’ve seen me, ratty underwear and all, I deserve to hear. Otherwise I’ll tell Quee you were spying on me.” I began talking to him the same way I had talked to Gerald, matter-of-fact and direct. “I’ll file a report of some kind.”

  “I think you’re very pretty.” He smiled when he said this, and I sat down in my little bedroom chair and crossed my legs tightly. I tried to angle myself so that he couldn’t see that I had not shaved my legs in ages. Gerald despises hairy legs, which of course is precisely why they are in this state. “I’ll confess I don’t really like the robe.” He stood there with his chin cupped in his hand while he looked me up and down like I might be some ancient urn.

  Now here, dear tape recorder, and you, whoever you are out there in recorderland, this is where I really screwed up. I mean why didn’t I say in low, guttural Kathleen Turner fashion: “Fine then, baby, I’ll take it off.” But no, I did what I always do and have my whole life, I got my nose out of joint and felt the need to defend myself, to state my case, to persuade him to look at it from my window. “Why? What’s wrong with it? I bought it in Chinatown, and it wasn’t cheap.”

  “It looks a little cheap, though, a little hookerish,” he said and then, as if that wasn’t enough, proceeded to let me know—as if I was interested!!—that he really sort of liked that All-American, sweet-girl look, he always had. “No offense,” he said and then, “I’m just not into games.”

  “Oh no? Oh no?” and I realized that I was picking up the same anger I left behind in Washington and was finishing up the job. “Then what was all that about ‘Maybe we could work something out’ when I said I liked some suffering?”

  “It was a joke.” He pulled this innocent-as-all-hell routine and held his hands up in the air as if to ward off blows. “Just something to say.” He breathed out, shoulders dropping. “Look, I’m sorry. I should have left when I started to. I haven’t flirted in a while; the truth is, I really am not interested in flirting or being seduced or any of that.”

  “Like I am?” I was screaming by now, you can just imagine how pissed I was. “Why would I want to pick up some two-bit odd-job redneck? Who’s coming on to who, Buddy?”

  “Well, think about it, and you tell me. And you don’t even know me. I’m not some redneck sent to serve your fat ass. I’m not a redneck!” He placed his hand on his chest and stepped back. “Man, are you crazy. You’re as crazy as Quee said you were. That’s one lucky husband left to himself.”

  I froze. I literally froze. The blood stopped running, and I turned my back completely on him so that he wouldn’t see how humiliated I felt. I hadn’t felt so humiliated since my wedding night, when Gerald informed me that he felt he could get used to my being so flatchested, that on his list of what he wanted in a woman it wasn’t the only one I failed (he said the others were that I didn’t like to drink cognac in front of a fire while he read aloud to
me from his own work). I told him that somebody who chooses not to drink alcohol would not up and start slugging cognac, that nobody in his right mind would sit in front of a roaring fire in Virginia in July, and that his work was often too difficult for me to follow in the air, I preferred to read it for myself. On the day I left, I told him that his shit work was boring as hell, that it was almost as boring as he was, that it is so boring, somebody could sell it out as sleeping medication. And of course, being a know-it-all who had to get the last word, he told me that he had always found my body so unattractive, that dealing with my breasts was kind of like gnawing on a bone some other dog got to first (he said this in what he thought was a rugged kind of cowboy voice but really sounded like Liberace having a tantrum). He said that he had always planned to buy me some lovely big breasts. I told him to buy himself some, that it seemed to me he might be much better suited to the transexual life.

  “I’m sorry.” Tom was right up near me then, but boy there was not a pheromone in the place. The pheromones just up and damn croaked. Where have all the pheromones gone, long time passing? They were out of there. And I’ll tell you right now, you whoever, archaeologist, visitor from another planet, museum curator, local cop, my butt is NOT that big. It looks bigger than it actually is.

  “Quee never said you were crazy. Really.” I didn’t answer him, just stared at that old muddy brogan of his that probably was about the size of what my brogan would be if I had a brogan. “She told me what happened to you, that’s all. I’m sorry, really.” I just shrugged, because what else in the hell can you do. I planned to say nothing, but then it was like I snapped—it’s like the absence of pheromones sent me. I said, “Fuck you, you fucked-up fucker.” I said it several times, again and again and now it was his turn to stand there like a drainpipe. He let me finish, he let my breath slow back down; he didn’t even tell me that during all of this my robe had slid open and I was standing there flashing him.