Sweet and Low

by Nick White

  After they finished singing, the new preacher strode to the pulpit. Brother Tim had been the youth director back in the days of Benjamin’s father. Benjamin didn’t trust him: He seemed too relaxed and feigned coolness—wearing a shiny pair of New Balances and a Ralph Lauren polo to preach in—as if he’d invented how to be cool, as if he and God had nicknames for each other. His father treated God as if He were a wizened professor; this guy treated God as if He were a frat brother. And it also didn’t help matters that every time he spotted Benjamin, Brother Tim always regaled him with the same old joke: “Hey, Benjamin, how you ben jammin’? I’ve ben jammin’ with JC! Ha, ha, ha!”

  Brother Tim welcomed the congregation and then led them in a prayer. Then he smiled and did one of his “cool” laughs that made Benjamin squirm. “Today,” he said, “we have such a treat for you. A visiting duo has asked to come sing for us, and let me tell you”—Brother Tim put his hand sideways against his lips as if he were telling the congregation a secret—“these little ladies can sure sing: Beth and Bella Cade.”

  The Cade sisters, who had been sitting in the front row, stood up and walked to the center of the aisle in front of the pulpit. They were dressed conservatively, wearing a knee-length plaid skirt and a square gray jacket that hugged their shoulders, making them seem narrower than they were. Their blond hair was identical: each had a tight bun behind the head.

  “Lord be my helper,” Aunt Beatrice whispered. There was a long silence in the church as the congregation appraised them and the girls situated themselves to be appraised. As they had done when they were on the diving board, they gazed out above the pews at some imagined object. They clasped hands, and the one on the left spoke first.

  “We will be singing ‘Beulah Land.’” She nodded to her sister, then they started singing, and it felt to Benjamin as if someone had turned on a CD player. Their voices, their harmonies, were that perfect to his ear. Listening to them, he thought about what his aunt had said about them earlier that morning, about it being a burden to be them: physically attached to another for the remainder of your life. But it occurred to him that it wasn’t a burden at all, that it was, in fact, a gift to have someone always there at your shoulder who knew you as well as—or better than—you knew yourself.

  The girls’ voices rose and rose, to the exposed rafters, filling up every crevice of the church, leaking out the windows. Somewhere, midway through the performance, his collar began to bother him. His throat was itchy, and the voices, though beautiful, were somehow making it worse. He longed for them to finish, but the song seemed to go on and on. He sat on his hands and resisted the urge to scream. In front of him, he noticed the empty pew was shaking. He freed one of his hands and touched it, the vibrating causing him to shake as well, as if an electric current passed through him. He glanced at his aunt, who clutched his father’s knee, and whispered to Benjamin, “Maybe he’ll stop when they finish.” Beside her sat his father, hunched over, gripping the pew ahead of him, trembling violently.

  * * *

  —

  MR. TUTTLEWORTH’S HOUSE was an old Queen Anne Victorian located on Tollivar Street in the historic district of town near the square. In addition to being painted a bright pink, the house had a three-story tower on the east end where Benjamin imagined the old artist sat for hours upon hours working on his latest canvas. Benjamin and Lucy were his only students who kept up with the lessons during the summer. They met in his large study that was cluttered with African masks and brightly colored vignettes from Spain and South America. In the corner, where Mr. Tuttleworth sometimes sat while they were drawing, were a knight’s armor and a spinning wheel that still retained an actual spindle. While Benjamin sat behind his sketch pad, he often wondered how easy it would be to get lost in Mr. Tuttleworth’s house. Get lost and never be heard from again: The thought was appealing.

  Today the teacher was droning on about the importance of shading, of the hard line, the particular stroke, and Benjamin, still reeling from the twins’ Sunday performance, heard very little. Also, he was ready to move beyond the simple objects his teacher put before him to draw. The chalky apples, the fluted melons, always paired with some strange artifact Mr. Tuttleworth had unearthed from the clutter of his house—it was boring, so lifeless, when compared to what he’d seen at the country club and the church.

  At one point during the lecture, Benjamin raised his hand. “Mr. Tuttleworth,” he said. “When are we going to draw other stuff?”

  Mr. Tuttleworth clicked his tongue, considering the question. “Other stuff?” Lucy gawked at Benjamin; normally, she was the one who spoke in class.

  “Yeah,” Benjamin continued. “Like people. You know, real things.”

  “Ah,” the teacher muttered. “People. You’re not ready.” He proceeded to tell Benjamin that he hadn’t found his voice as an artist yet and probably wouldn’t for some time, that he needed to spend his youth focusing on technique. Let the “challenging pieces” come in their due moment. After all, he’d been drawing for only a little more than a year.

  “My voice?”

  “Yes. Your voice. Perhaps better to say your eye: the part of your imagination that is different and unique from everyone else’s. One of the biggest challenges is discovering what you see about the world that no one else does, and then you have to execute it brilliantly.”

  Lucy’s hand shot in the air, but she spoke before she was called on. “What if,” she asked, “you can’t find it—this eye-voice thingy. What if everything’s already been taken and how you see the world is just a copy of somebody else’s?”

  Mr. Tuttleworth adjusted the black-rimmed glasses on his nose, pushing them closer to his eyes. He had a lumpy figure and wore his pants too high to be comfortable. “Well, then,” he said, and put his hands in his pockets. “I think if that is the case, truly the case, then you’ve just figured out whether or not you are really an artist.”

  After class, Lucy asked Benjamin if he wanted to come to her house for a snack. Her father was a well-to-do ophthalmologist, and her family lived just outside of town in a small suburb filled with rows and rows of brick houses, the kind of houses with neat lawns and polished shutters that Benjamin saw on TV shows when the family was supposed to be upper middle class, though, in truth, in the Delta, living in such houses meant you were basically rich. The walk to her house seemed to him to be one of the longest in his life. They moved at a sluggish pace—Lucy not being a fast walker—down Hutchinson Street, which crossed the railroad tracks, passed the old grain elevator, and led straight to her family’s little cul-de-sac. Lucy kept talking about this book she was reading—some exaggerated romance with lizard people and vampire-werewolf hybrids—and by the time they reached her house, he was ready to turn around and go back home. But then he remembered that Lucy lived near where the twins were living with their aunt. He asked her which one of the houses was the twins’, and she said, “Oh, them. They’re one street over.” She pointed in the direction of the house. “Their house is the only two-story on their street.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever met someone like them before.”

  “Ha,” Lucy said, sniffing. “I’ve seen the likes before. The way they talk! Like some kind of Ole Miss bitch.”

  Benjamin sighed. In that moment, he decided that he could never like Lucy. After leaning his bike against the mailbox, he followed her inside the house, wanting a glass of water, then he’d make up some excuse to leave. The rooms were quiet, and she explained to him that her mother had taken her brother to the movies. They sat on uncomfortable barstools in the kitchen area and drank tall glasses of orange juice and ate two Fruit Roll-Ups apiece. Benjamin was licking his sticky fingers when she asked, “So what made you speak up in class today about drawing people?”

  Benjamin thought for a minute. He didn’t want to tell her his plan for the Cade twins because he knew she’d be against the whole thing. She was probably, after all, still
smarting from their stealing some of the attention at her birthday party. So he said that he was just curious, just tired of the same old shit.

  She nodded, and then her eyes got wide with an idea. “Let’s go listen to some of my CDs in my room,” she said, and grabbed his hand. Her touch was clammy and rough, and he snatched his hand out of her grasp, which she didn’t seem to notice.

  “May need to start heading back,” he said, jumping off the barstool. He realized that this was the first time he’d ever been alone with a girl, at her house, with no parents nearby. And she had just asked him to her bedroom. His lips felt dry and coarse against his gums when he smiled and said that he needed to go.

  “One song. My sound system is top-notch. Got it for Christmas last year.”

  She skipped back to her room, her fingers trailing along the walls. Benjamin eyed his bicycle from the living-room window. He could make a run for it if he wanted. Fucking man up, he told himself. She’s just a girl. A fat girl.

  Her room was swathed in various posters of country music singers. Tracy Lawrence was tacked on the wall above her headboard while Patty Loveless and Suzy Bogguss shared a space on her closet door. The room made him uncomfortable, all those eyes watching him. He sat on the floor and crossed his legs, which appeared to disappoint Lucy who sat on the bed. She flopped back on the mattress with an exaggerated fall. For the next ten minutes, they listened to two tracks from Bonnie Raitt’s album Streetlights. After the second song ended, he stood and said that it was getting late. This was the truth: The sun was bleeding red light through her room’s window.

  “Wait,” she said, and circled her fingers around his wrist. “Listen to one more. The next track is ‘Angel from Montgomery.’ It’s the one I wanted you to hear in the first place.” He nodded, and she turned on the song. When it began to play, she moved closer to him, eyes shut, mouth wet and open. He ducked from her kiss and stepped back to the door.

  “Really,” he said. “I got shit to do.”

  The hurt on her face was evident, almost made her somewhat beautiful for a moment. His stomach felt queasy as he stumbled down the hall, and when he was outside in the fresh air, he began to feel more at ease with himself. He hopped on his bike and pedaled across the street and then turned and backtracked, cycling his way up the next street over. It didn’t take him long to find the only two-story house on that road. He left his bike a few houses down and snuck through the backyards. Evening was coming on heavy, and there wasn’t much light left when he made it to the yard. The house had pale vinyl siding and thick storm windows; the second floor looked just as roomy as the first. Three tall windows looked down the street from the second floor, and he tried to imagine which one was the twins’ bedroom. Large shrubs outlined the house; they were dry and scrubby from the summer heat. He went up to them and waved his hands over the prickly sprigs, feeling them break and crumble under the pads of his fingers. From above, he heard a sound—a heavy footstep or a door closing. He looked up just in time to see the white curtains being drawn.

  * * *

  —

  LATER THAT NIGHT, he was in his room doodling in his notebook. He did all his practice drawings in the cheap notebooks his aunt bought him at the grocery store. The blue horizontal lines took the pressure off his own lines being perfect. He was trying to draw the twins’ faces, but they hadn’t come out right: he wasn’t able to capture that sense of awe he’d experienced at the pool. Instead, their faces, linked to the same shoulder, kept looking more and more like a caricature. His window was open, and the balmy night air blew into his room, smelling of fruity detergent. His aunt was washing clothes in the carport next to his room, and the dull racket of the washing machine filled the house. Then the phone rang. After two rings, someone picked up.

  He looked up from his notebook and found his aunt standing in the doorway, looking down at him. “Phone for you,” she said. “Some girl.” There was a slight mocking smile on her face. Benjamin couldn’t help himself; he blushed. He figured it was probably Lucy.

  “Benjamin,” the voice said when he placed the receiver to his ear, and he knew immediately who it was. “This is Bella Cade. We met at the country club.”

  He almost dropped the phone. “Yes, Bella. Good. Fine.” The tone of her voice was confident and direct, same as it was that day in the pool. He felt his back tighten as they continued to talk. He experienced the sensation of falling, as if he were hurtling down the long dip on a roller coaster.

  “We were thinking about your offer for us to be your—What was that word again, sister? Oh, yes, your offer for us to be your objets d’art.”

  * * *

  —

  HE MET THEM two days later when he decided to skip art class and go straight to their house. The twins greeted him at the back door wearing a pair of skinny jeans and an oversize purple T-shirt. Their hair was damp and wavy, and smelled like strawberry soap. “You’re late,” Bella said. They moved out of the way to let him enter. The inside of the house looked vaguely like the inside of Lucy’s house; the interior had this glossy sheen the parsonage lacked. Benjamin wondered what a woman without any kids did with so much space. When the twins shut the door behind him, the falling sensation came back to him, that slow tug downward into darkness.

  “We don’t have a lot of time today,” Beth said. “Aunt Viv doesn’t stay long at the beauty shop.”

  “Not as long as she should,” Bella interjected. She nodded for him to follow them. They walked upstairs to their room, which had only a bed and a behemoth chest of drawers that took up most of a whole wall. The natural light in the room made everything shimmer. Benjamin studied how easily they walked, each one—he assumed—controlling the function of one of the legs. Their coordination was excellent. They sat on the bed and stared at him, their eyes an unreal ocean blue, and he realized that they were expecting him to speak.

  “So,” he said, and showed them his satchel. “I brought my sketch pad. I guess we can do it here. The light’s about perfect.”

  “On the contrary,” Bella said. “We want to see your work first. Make sure we aren’t, you know, wasting our time.”

  This peeved Benjamin. “Work?”

  “Yes,” said Beth, her voice much quieter and more reasonable sounding than Bella’s. “How do we know if you are any good or not?”

  He laughed, thinking at first that they must be teasing him, but neither face so much as suggested a smile. He shuffled through the stuff in his bag and pulled out his sketch pad. “I only have what I’ve been doing for class. Nothing special.”

  “That’ll do.”

  He flipped to one of his cleanest drawings, the one he had slaved over for more than a month: a row of books bookended on either side by a tomato. He was best at circles, which made him figure he could render a face fairly easily. He gave them the pad. They gazed at the drawing for what seemed to Benjamin like the entire afternoon. While they were appraising his work, Bella fumbled with the little nightstand by the bed, pulling out a pack of Virginia Slims and a neon-green lighter.

  “Sister?” she said, and Beth set the drawings aside and lit her sister’s cigarette. Bella took a long drag and then threw back her head and exhaled smoke.

  “Open the window,” Beth said. “Aunt Viv’ll have our hide.”

  Benjamin motioned for them to keep their seats and went to open it for them.

  “A gentleman,” Beth said.

  “Not anything like we heard. Picking fights, causing trouble.” Bella took another long drag, seemingly to savor the taste of it. “Seriously, though, this artwork is shit.”

  “I can do better,” he said quickly. “I just need the right subject. The right motivation.”

  “I’ll admit that there’s a rawness here I like very much,” Beth said.

  “You’re too nice,” Bella said.

  “Oh, give him a break.”

  Bella lifted her hand. �
�All right, all right. Some of this”—she was flipping through the pages again as she spoke—“is passable. But the boy is no Cézanne.”

  “Do we really want a Cézanne?”

  “No, but I don’t want our portrait to look like a Picasso either. Tell me, sister, do you want your ears attached somewhere below your waist? Aren’t we unique enough?”

  Beth turned toward Benjamin, who’d been watching the interaction between the two faces, silent and fascinated. Fascinated, that is, by the ease with which they communicated with each other but also terrified and—if he were honest with himself—a little angered by how dismissive they were of his work. “So we will be your first,” Beth said, and Bella, dumping her ashes into the open drawer, giggled. They stopped talking and seemed to be pondering something. Benjamin knew they shared skin and blood, but he wondered if they could share thoughts too.

  “Okay,” Bella said, finally. “We will let you draw us. But we want a copy of it when you finish— No, the original.”

  “For our mother,” Beth said. “She’ll like it.”

  Benjamin was nodding as they spoke. They set up dates and times for them to meet for the rest of the summer before they headed back home to Kentucky in mid-August.