Mr. Winters was watching me — I felt it, even though I’d closed my eyes. I heard his voice say, “Of course some folks can’t abide the things…”
I opened my eyes. “The best thing I ever tasted.”
“That right?” He laughed softly.
“Ever.” We looked at each other with complete understanding.
Then we stopped looking and talking, and settled down to eating. We went through four dozen in no time.
You know, there are some things in life we either love or hate. No middle ground. Oysters are such things. By the way, they taste blue — the muted, salty shade of a London blue topaz.
Back in the truck, thoroughly sated, feeling oxygen moving like elixir through me, I said, “Thank you.”
He made his funny shrug again and started the truck. As we drove off, he said, “I had a daughter, once.”
I looked over at him, but his face in profile didn’t show emotion. “What became of her?”
“She married an idiot,” he said.
We didn’t speak for a minute. Then I found myself asking, “Did you ever meet my father?”
“Oh yes.” He turned the truck off the highway, into a neighborhood of old houses. “Met him three or four times. Liked him the first two.”
I didn’t know what to say.
He drove onto a quiet street of old houses, and pulled up close to a corner, under an enormous magnolia tree. Some of its blossoms weren’t open yet, and they were conical, the color of pale straw. Hard to imagine them opening into saucer-shaped white blooms, but the tree held plenty of evidence that they could, and would.
“So we’re here.” He looked across at me, his blue eyes serious. “Now, your auntie, if she’s home, is someone you’ll need time to get to know. She’s one of them…ladylike women, if you know what I mean.”
I didn’t know.
“She would never in her life eat a raw oyster,” he said. “She’s the kind you see in tearooms, eating little sandwiches on white bread with the crusts cut off.”
We left the truck. The house was gray, with two stories, symmetrical and plain in design, with a large, empty yard off to its left.
“That’s where she had the rose garden,” he said, speaking to himself. “Looks like it got dug up.”
He stood slightly behind me on the front porch as I rang the bell. The porch was well swept, and the windows above it were hung with lace curtains and Venetian blinds.
I rang the bell a second time. We heard it echo inside.
Mr. Winters said, “Well, you know —”
Then the door opened. A woman in a shapeless housedress looked at us with eyes that were the same color as mine. She was shorter and stouter than me. We stared at each other. She smoothed back her chin-length gray hair, then rested her hands on her neck.
“Good heavens,” she said. “Are you Sara’s girl?”
Mr. Winters left us soon afterward, but he wrote his telephone number in pencil on an old gas station receipt and handed it to me, with a wink, as he went out.
It wasn’t an easy reunion.
Aunt Sophie, it became clear within minutes, had been thoroughly disappointed by life. Again and again, people had let her down. She had been engaged once, to a man who later left town without saying goodbye.
While her accent was similar to that of Mr. Winters in its treatment of vowels, hers was higher and harsher in tone and more correct in grammar. I much preferred to listen to Mr. Winters. In fact, as I sat on the overstuffed, uncomfortable sofa in the parlor, lace doilies perched precariously on its arms and head, I wished Mr. Winters were related to me, instead of this person who clearly loved to talk and didn’t care or know how to listen.
“Your mother” — she paused to widen her eyes and shake her head — “hasn’t been in touch with me for years. Can you imagine a sister like that? But of course you’re an only child, Arabella. But not even a Christmas card. Not even a call on my birthday. Can you imagine?”
If I hadn’t recently consumed the best lunch of my life, I might have told her that yes, I could imagine. I might have added that my name wasn’t Arabella. I might even have walked out. She was boring, and repetitive, and condescending, and selfish. Within minutes I knew she’d been jealous of Sara all her life, and I suspected she’d treated my mother badly. But the joy of discovering oysters lingered, made me forgiving and tolerant. The world wasn’t such a bad place that afternoon, even if Aunt Sophie was in it.
She sat on the edge of her chair, ankles in pale nylons neatly aligned above low-heeled black pumps, as if she were the guest in the house. She looked to be in her late fifties; her mouth had a permanent downcast purse, and her skin a sallowness that I’d expect to see in a much older, thinner woman. Yet her eyes suggested that once she’d been pretty.
Her hands were jammed into her apron’s pockets, and her elbows looked dry and red. The room was decorated in beige and white, the furniture square and uncomfortable. A glass-fronted curio cabinet imprisoned porcelain figurines of impossibly cheerful children. Not one thing in the room felt genuine.
She had a way of beginning a story, then interjecting irrelevant comments of disapproval (“Your hair is so long” was one). After a while I stopped trying to make sense of it and simply let the words wash over me, knowing I’d sort them out later, if ever.
When she invited me to spend the night it was with such reluctance, such an odd, questioning note in her voice, that I was tempted to leave. But she was my aunt. She knew things about my mother, even if they were half-articulated. So I decided to stay.
We dined on chicken salad scooped onto leaves of iceberg lettuce, with green seedless grapes for dessert. Afterward, in the spare bedroom, I felt disappointed and deflated. I took a hefty swig of tonic and reminded myself that, besides Aunt Sophie, the world contained oysters, Roger Winters, and my mother — that is, if my mother was still alive. I pulled out my journal and began to write.
Sophie had last seen my mother thirteen years ago, soon after my birth. (She didn’t say that, but I figured out the dates, lying in bed.)
My mother had shown up on her doorstep one afternoon.
“Just the way you did,” Sophie told me. “I guess people are too busy to call first.”
“Was your phone number unlisted then, too?” I asked.
“Oh,” she said, making the word last three syllables. “I don’t remember that. You know, I had to have my number taken out of the telephone directory. A man kept calling here, and he said he dialed the wrong number, but I knew from his voice what sort he was. It’s not an easy life, living alone.” And off she went on a rant about the sorrows of spinsterhood, and being too poor to live in a gated community, and how she’d had to buy her very own revolver.
Anyway, my mother had arrived in sorry shape, Sophie said. “She looked terrible, and she hadn’t even packed a bag. And she wouldn’t tell me a thing — she wanted some money, and of course I don’t have any.”
For three minutes I heard about the loss of the family fortune two generations back, and the sorry circumstances that forced Sophie into a menial job at a local rose nursery.
The thing about my aunt’s mind — its meandering was infectious. Soon I found myself thinking in weird loops and tangents, Sophie-style. So it took considerable effort, as I lay in bed that night, trying to pull together the facts.
My mother had shown up. She’d looked ill. She’d asked for money. She said she’d left Saratoga Springs for good, that she was headed for a new life. She asked Sophie not to tell anyone she’d been there.
“Well, of course the second she left, I was on the phone to your father,” Sophie said. “He’d called me a month or so before, to see if she was here. Can you imagine — running away from a newborn baby?”
What could I say to that? But it didn’t matter, since she was already talking again.
“Your father, he’s a strange fellow. Don’t you think so? Such a handsome boy he was, and so full of life. All the girls were half in love with him �
�� why he chose Sara I never will know, she had such a temper. Raphael — we called him Raff — was such a good dancer. So full of life. Then he went off to England. Something must have happened to him over there. By the time he came back, all the fire was gone out of him.” She nodded emphatically. “England,” she said, as if the nation itself were to blame.
The next morning, after a meager breakfast of stale biscuits and butter that tasted old, I thanked Sophie for her hospitality and told her I planned to move on. “My mother didn’t tell you anything about where she was going?”
“She said she was headed south.” Sophie adjusted the crocheted tablecloth, whose irregular loops and bumps suggested it was homemade. “Does your father know where you are?” She looked up at me, her eyes suddenly sharp.
I’d taken a sip from my juice glass — ruby-red grapefruit juice from a can — and its tart yet saccharine flavor made me want to spit it out. Instead, I swallowed. “Of course,” I said. Then, to deflect her, I asked, “Do you have any photos of my mother?”
“I threw them away,” she said, her voice matter-of-fact. “I mean, all those years of never hearing from her — not even a birthday card, only that cheap postcard —”
“She sent you a postcard?”
“It was a picture of an animal, some sea creature. Vulgar-looking.”
I tried to be patient. “Where was it sent from?”
“Someplace in Florida.” She pressed her hands against her forehead. “You can’t expect me to remember everything. Aren’t you going to finish your juice?”
I said I thought I’d better be on my way.
“Don’t you want to call your father?” Again, her eyes changed from vague to sharp.
“I spoke to him yesterday,” I lied.
“Oh.” Her eyes went vague again. “You have one of those cellular telephones?”
“Yes.” I picked up my backpack and moved toward the door, hoping that she wouldn’t ask to see it.
Although Aunt Sophie’s attitude toward me had been close to indifferent, it now blossomed into a wavering show of affection. She put her hand on my shoulder, staring disapprovingly at my hair. “Where are you going today?” she asked in a bright voice.
“South.” I had no idea where I was going. “I’m going to stay with friends.”
“You know, it’s a strange thing.” Sophie patted her hair, which didn’t need patting — it seemed lacquered into place. “Your mother always made a wish when she saw a white horse. She was superstitious to a fault.” Sophie’s voice went dark. “That ridiculous wedding, held in the dead of night.”
“You were at their wedding?”
She turned and walked out of the room. I stood by the door, my backpack on, wondering, What now? I wondered if my aunt was senile, or if she’d always been this way. The small, beige-walled dining room, antiseptically neat, looked as if it had been rarely if ever used. Suddenly I felt sorry for her.
Sophie came back, carrying a green leather photo album. “I’d forgotten I had this. Come and sit in the parlor.”
So we went back to the uncomfortable sofa, and this time she sat next to me. She opened the album. And there they were, my mother and father, looking back at me. My mother — to finally see her face! She looked radiant — her eyes wide, her smile joyous, her long auburn hair shining. She wore a white evening dress that shimmered like a fire opal. My father looked elegant in a tuxedo, but his face was blurred.
“Can you imagine wearing a dress like that at your wedding? And no veil.” Sophie sighed. “Not a good picture of Raff. None of them turned out well.”
She flipped the page. Another photo of my parents, this one taken by candlelight against a background of bamboo trees. “They had the wedding outdoors in a garden down in Florida.” My aunt’s voice sounded bitter. “Way down in Florida. Sarasota, it was called. They took us down there on the train.”
“Sarasota?”
“She chose it because of the name.” Sophie made a clicking sound with her tongue. “That was the way Sara did things. Did you ever?”
I turned the next page, and the one after it. In each photo, my mother looked beautiful and serene, my father indistinct. “She’s so lovely.” I had to say it.
Sophie didn’t respond. “You can have it, if you want it.”
It took me a second to understand. She thrust the album toward me.
“Thank you.” I took the book, and looked across at my aunt. Her eyes were sad, but they changed even as I looked, sharp again.
“How are you traveling, Missy?”
I couldn’t tell her my plan: to be an invisible hitchhiker again. “I thought I’d take the train,” I said.
She nodded briskly. “I’ll drive you to the station.”
“You don’t have to do that,” I said, but she refused to listen.
I stood outside, watching her back her car out of the garage. It took a while. When I got in, I asked her, “Whatever happened to your rose garden?”
Her face turned sour. “It was a never-ending battle with Japanese beetles,” she said. “I tried every kind of pesticide you can think of. Nothing fazed them. They made me so mad, I even shot some of them, but that damaged the rosebushes. One day I decided it wasn’t worth the struggle, and I pulled them up by the roots, every last one of them.”
I’d thought Sophie would drop me off at the station, but instead she parked and came inside with me. So I joined the line at the tickets window, forced to choose a destination. “How much is a ticket to Florida?” I asked.
“Whereabouts in Florida?” the clerk asked.
“Um, Sarasota,” I said.
“Train goes to Tampa or Orlando,” he said. “And the rest of the way, you take the bus. Either way, a one-way ticket is $82.”
He said that Tampa was further south. I counted out the bills. “When does the train leave?”
“It leaves at 6:50,” he said, “a.m., tomorrow.”
And so I had another night in the hard narrow bed at Sophie’s, preceded by another lackluster dinner of chicken salad. Did she eat anything else? I wondered. I wished I could call Mr. Winters and have dinner with him, instead of being Sophie’s captive audience. Tonight’s topics included her noisy neighbors, the horrors of dogs, more evidence of my mother’s spoiled and selfish nature, and Sophie’s digestive problems.
I tried to listen only to the parts about my mother (“She had to have horseback riding lessons, even though they cost a fortune and she came home filthy afterwards. I couldn’t bear the smell”), but it was hard to concentrate, because Sophie’s thoughts kept interfering. Even when I tried to block her thoughts, they trickled through somehow. She had suspicions about me; she thought at first I’d “come looking for money,” and when I didn’t ask for any she grew suspicious that I had too much of my own. What was I doing, traveling alone at my age? She wondered if I was taking drugs. She didn’t think my father had any idea where I was, but she wasn’t about to call him after that last time, when he sounded so ungrateful.
I wanted to ask about that, but I kept quiet. The most interesting thing I learned was that for years my mother had given Sophie financial support; she sent money every week when she had her bee-keeping job (Sophie was too genteel to take a job herself), and when my parents married, they gave Sophie five thousand dollars to help her start a rose nursery. But Sophie’s jumbled thoughts were bitter even about that: a measly five thousand, when they had so much. If they’d given me ten, the business might have survived. Will you look at her hair? I’d like to cut it myself, make her look respectable.
We said good-night, both of us weary yet wary. Sophie thought I might creep about the house, looking for cash or something else to steal. I worried that she might try to cut off my hair while I slept.
Next morning, she woke me at 5:30 and urged me to hurry. “You need to get to the station at least half an hour early,” she said.
Sophie drove with both hands clenched on the steering wheel, slowing down whenever another car approached. “Onl
y drunks out at this hour,” she said.
We made it by 6:20. It was cold and not quite light outside, and despite my fleece jacket, I shivered.
Sophie also felt the cold, but she wasn’t about to leave. She felt it was her duty to make sure I got on the train. In truth, if she hadn’t been around, I would have asked for a refund and hitchhiked instead.
So we stood and shivered together, watching the train approach.
Saying goodbye to her was awkward. Clearly, we’d proven a mutual disappointment. But she presented her dry, powdered cheek, which I kissed lightly, and that seemed to suffice.
“You call me when you get there,” she said, and I said I would, both of us knowing that I wouldn’t.
The train’s name was the Silver Star, and from the moment I saw it, I loved it. I looked around at the other passengers, many of them asleep, blankets pulled up to their chins, and I wondered where they’d come from and where they were going. The conductor who checked my ticket wore a navy blue uniform and a crisp white shirt, and he smiled at me and called me “Ma’am.” I loved that, too.
Sometimes I felt like thirteen, not “going on thirty” — alive in all my senses, filled with curiosity and wonder. Today was such a day. As the train picked up speed, its horn blew, and we moved smoothly through a brightening landscape, through woods, past lakes and streams, past towns only beginning to waken. A few passengers stirred and wakened, and some passed me on their way to the dining car for breakfast. I felt content where I was.
I lay back in my leather seat, my feet extended on the footrest, and let the gentle sway of the car rock me to sleep. When I awoke, we were pulling into Jacksonville, Florida. The loudspeaker said we’d stop for ten minutes, and we could leave the train and find coffee and food in the station.
I didn’t want coffee or food, but I decided to stretch my legs, so I walked along the platform, savoring the fresh air. Florida’s air smelled different from Georgia’s. It was still early morning, and the scent was faint but pronounced: a humid earthy odor, with hints of flowering citrus and rotting vegetation in it. Later I’d learn the smell is characteristic of land and vegetation that bake in intense sun, then sizzle in heavy rain.
The Society of S Page 17
