by Betsy Carter
As intimate as the girls were at home at night, during the day it was as if they had never met. Crystal was more popular than ever. Suffering a formidable and public tragedy had elevated her status with the kids at school. “You are so brave” or “You are so strong,” they’d tell her. They assumed she knew things that they didn’t. She had become the person that everyone thanked their lucky stars they weren’t, though if she knew, she didn’t let on. Rather than pity her outright, they made her a cheerleader and president of the Pep Club and anointed her a member of the Homecoming Queen’s Court. She’d walk down the hall and people would say “Hey” and she would say “Hey” in an animated voice, as if their greeting had taken her by surprise. At lunch, she’d sit at the table with the football players and the other popular boys who were members of The Key Club, and Wheel Club. (When Dinah said, “They should merge and become “The Bicycle Club,” Crystal pursed her lips and said, “Ha ha. So funny, I forgot to laugh.”) Crystal thrived in her heroism, and accepted her popularity as her due.
If anything, Crystal’s popularity made Dinah more headstrong than ever. She cared less about curbing her tongue and being polite, and more about saying what she felt to be the truth. “You should hear her with the boys,” she’d tell her mother. “She has this loud shrieky laugh. She never laughs that way when I say something funny, and trust me, I’m a lot funnier than they are.” Crystal swore she hadn’t gone all the way with her boyfriend, Huddie Harwood, a thick, squarely built boy with small gray eyes so close together that he looked perpetually confused, but Dinah was convinced it was just a matter of time. On Saturday nights Huddie would come to the house reeking of Canoe, his flattop perfectly waxed. His cheeks were angled like the bow of a boat, and his moist red lips gave him a sated look, as if he had just polished off a baby. “How do you do, Ma’am,” he’d say to Tessie, as though they’d never met, and to Dinah, “Hello there,” which she did not consider a substitute for conversation.
Crystal was tall now, and stacked. The few pounds of baby fat that drove her mother crazy now gave her hips a sexy curve and filled out her breasts, which only added to her popularity. She’d always wait until Tessie, Dinah, and Huddie were seated in the living room before making her entrance. That way, everyone would have to notice her hair done up in a tight French twist, the extra load of frosted-blue eye shadow and black mascara, the low-cut chemise she’d bought on her mother’s credit at Mina Lee’s. “Hi Huddie,” she’d say in a singsong way, as if she knew his secrets. She had this way of lowering her head and raising her eyes toward him like a little girl. Dinah hated that eye-rolling thing. Couldn’t anyone else see what an act it was? Then Huddie would smile, only one side of his mouth turning up, and look at Crystal through his slothlike eyes. “Ready-O?” he’d ask, and each time Crystal would laugh as if this was the most original thing she’d ever heard. “Ready-O,” she’d say, her eyes sweeping past Tessie and Dinah and landing right back on Huddie.
Huddie was president of one of those bicycle clubs. He played varsity football and was running for class president. He had a deep round laugh and laughed often so that everyone around him thought they were having a good time. Crystal was helping him with his campaign. At least that’s what she’d say when she’d come home from his house at seven o’clock on weeknights, her lipstick smushed around her mouth. “Huddie and I were working on strategies for his campaign.”
Dinah would laugh, “I’ll bet you and Huddie were working on strategies.” Crystal would give her one of those “Oh you,” looks and claim she had to finish her homework.
“THE GREAT THING about Crystal Landy, when you get her away from her crowd, is what you see is what you get,” Dinah would tell Charlie. The same could not be said about Dinah Lockhart.
No one knew that during lunchtime Dinah left school, ran south down University Avenue, turned right after the bright orange Gulf sign and just before Fremac’s luncheonette, and ducked into the store with the purple and blue neon sign outside that buzzed like a fly zapper. She’d kiss Charlie on the cheek and tell him what kind of sandwiches she’d brought for lunch. “It’s Bologna Day!” she’d exclaim, or “Peanut butter or peanut butter? Your choice.” They’d sit on the two folding bridge chairs behind the counter. “So, BB Girl, how’s your day going so far?” he’d ask. She’d tell him about her math teacher who’d showed up with a brown shoe on his left foot and a black one on his right, or how she got the highest grade on her English test. He called her BB Girl after she’d told him how her dad used to call her his Boing Boing Girl. She felt dopey telling him, but then, a few days later he’d said, “How’s BB Girl today?” and the nickname stuck. If her dad had lived to see her at sixteen, tall, lean, and graceful with her short curly red hair and quick brown eyes, she imagined he’d know that she’d grown too old and elegant to be anyone’s Boing Boing Girl. He’d probably have come up with BB Girl himself. Charlie was amazing that way.
He liked to talk about things that were not necessarily of that time or place, questions you could talk about infinitely and still not come up with answers. He talked about faith, war, the cure for cancer, loss. “Nothing is really gone,” he said one day. “What’s gone or taken comes back in different ways. You just have to recognize what they are. My house burned to the ground, but I feel certain I will live in my house somewhere sometime again. It just won’t look the same.” Dinah could listen to Charlie talk forever. Sometimes he spoke of the things he saw that later came true. When he told her how he’d had dreams about the fire before it happened, it didn’t scare her. She told him about Eddie Fingers, and how after her dad died, she would sometimes lie in bed as still as she could and pretend she was dead, too. “If it hadn’t been for Crystal, I might just have died.”
“That girl is a source of life,” said Charlie. “Even though she may be the death of my mother.”
“It would take more than Crystal to kill your mother,” said Dinah.
“My mother. That’s a whole other story.” He moved his lips as if he were about to say something else, but then covered his mouth with his hand as if to stop the words from coming.
“What?” asked Dinah, knowing that Charlie rarely spoke unkindly about anyone, even his mother. “You can tell me.”
“What I was thinking is my mother is a life force who feeds her soul by depleting others. Crystal knows that and she refuses to let hers be eaten up. That’s why she won’t come home.”
As they ate their peanut butter sandwiches—the corners of their chairs bumped up against each other—they stared into the streets of downtown Gainesville. The two-story stucco office buildings looked like sugar cubes under the blaze of the noonday sun. The low-slung phone wires draped across the landscape like sheet music. It was a cloudless afternoon in October, just before homecoming weekend at the university. There were blue-and-orange signs everywhere that said “Go Gators.” Blue-and-orange strips of crepe paper hung from the lamposts and were wrapped around the young live oaks. The festive streamers looked dejected on this humid windless day. The streets were empty, and the whole place had the feeling of a party waiting for its guests. “Take a good look,” said Charlie. “This is the last of it.”
Even though she didn’t understand what he meant by his remark, it was the kind of thing he would say that made her feel special. He knew things she would never know and in his wisdom she felt as reassured and comforted as a child enfolded in her father’s arms.
It was 12:45, time for Dinah to get back to school. With her pinky, she daintily wiped a piece of peanut butter from the crease of his mouth. “See you tomorrow,” she said. “Tomorrow,” he said, planting a virginal kiss on her forehead. For a long while after she left, he could feel a slight throbbing on the crease of his mouth from where her finger had been. Always this physical discomfort, the afterlife of her touch, the smell of her clean shampooed hair. For a young man who lived mostly in his head, the rest of his body was making quite a hullabaloo, and he hadn’t the slightest idea of what to do about it.
That night, when he came home from work, he could hear his mother and Reggie in the living room, working at the same jigsaw puzzle they’d been putting together for the past three days. It was one of those puzzles with thousands of pieces that came in a large deep box. The picture on the cover was of a cable car running up a street in San Francisco. There were painstaking details of people on the cable car, the tracks in the streets, the bay in the background. Charlie couldn’t understand why anyone would spend days recreating what was already so clearly depicted. Where was the surprise or the mystery? He could tell by the sound of his mother’s voice that Reggie must have just tried to force a piece with curves into a space defined by edges. “Think, Reggie,” she demanded. “Use your head. God didn’t give you brains just to hold up your ears.”
Victoria rarely just spoke to Reggie. She shouted at him in loud imperative sentences, as though she had just grabbed him by the lapels and was shaking him to make a point.
“Hey, I’m home,” said Charlie, rubbing his mother’s shoulder as she deliberately fitted what appeared to be the brim of the conductor’s navy cap into the tableau on the dining-room table.
“Hello, my precious boy,” said Victoria, her voice suddenly sweet and fluffy, her eyes never leaving the puzzle. “Reggie and I are doing our puzzle.”
Charlie suspected that Reggie felt like a man in jail. “You’ve done your time,” he wanted to say, but something told him that Reggie was still doing penance. So he winked at him instead.
“Your mama sure does give my brain a work-through,” said Reggie, using the back of his hand to wipe beads of sweat from behind his neck.
“Reggie, if you’re going to mop yourself up, be civil and use a handkerchief,” said Victoria, glaring at Reggie’s neck. Then, in her softer voice, she said to Charlie, “Darling, Ella’s in the kitchen, and I know she’s cooked up a nice roast beef. I’ll be along shortly.”
“THEY’RE QUITE A PAIR,” Charlie said to Ella, pointing with his eyes toward the living room.
“This goes on all day long. The cussing and the yelling. I’m telling you, I’ve known Reggie Sykes since the day he was born and I never saw him listen to nobody the way he listens to Mrs. Landy. That boy’s got such a bad temper on him, I wonder that he hasn’t raised his hand. But he’s as meek as a lamb. Lord, forgive me for saying this, but he’s a man who has seen the other side—and it wasn’t heaven either. I pray for his soul.”
Normally, Charlie would have relished discussing Reggie Sykes and his up-for-grabs soul, but not tonight. He had other things on his mind and he couldn’t wait to talk to Ella about them. His sit-downs with Ella had become routine, every night after dinner. Though he was less gregarious than his father, Charlie was a good listener. People at the store told him things that were personal or revealing, and never felt in danger of being judged or talked about behind their backs. They were comforted by his broad smile and solid demeanor, and noticed how, when they would talk, he would cock his head and stare straight on at them with his soft blue eyes, so as not to miss a word. Because he said so little, people felt free to interpret his silence in ways that would suit them, and as a result, they revealed even more.
All day he listened, keeping the stories in his head so that when he and Ella had their time together, they could discuss the characters she had come to know through his telling.
“Betty Foley was in today.” She was the registered nurse with the crooked nose and the veined hands who usually showed up around four, just off her early morning shift.
“How’s old Mr. Thayer doing?” asked Ella.
Ben Thayer was the pharmacist, muted now by a stroke.
“Betty says she can see something going on in his eyes. She says that when she sings to him, particularly the Irish songs, his eyes seem to get moist.” Betty told Charlie that she sang to Mr. Thayer while she bathed him. Charlie could imagine her voice, husky and intimate, as if she were talking to someone she couldn’t see. “Just so’s you don’t think there’s anything lewd in my manner,” she said, her voice tilting to a question. “I think it makes him feel less shamed about his nakedness.”
“Mr. Thayer’s a real proud man,” said Ella. “I’m sure Betty Foley is a fine comfort to him.”
Then she asked about Isaac Solomon, the gardener. “Did he have anything to say today?”
Isaac came in for a pint of scotch every couple of days and always paid with exact change. Each time he’d say, “Howdy doo, Mr. Landy, it certainly is a fine day, isn’t it?” Isaac had a terrible stutter. A good day for him was when he didn’t have to speak. He let his gardens—magical designs with bursts of color, secret pathways, and exotic sweeps of grass—talk for him. Charlie knew how hard it was for him to utter that cheerful greeting. He’d always tried to say something in return to make Isaac aware that people noticed him, but without obligating him to give an answer. “Nice job with the Roscoes’ rock garden, it’s the pride of the neighborhood,” he’d say. Isaac would nod and purse his lips, as if he were mulling it over.
Last winter, after Isaac didn’t show up for over a week, Charlie learned that he was sick with pneumonia. Isaac didn’t have a phone, but since he went to Ella’s church, she knew where he lived. On a Sunday afternoon, she and Charlie walked through the colored section of town to Isaac’s one-room wooden house. They found him lying in bed, his eyes glassy and his face flushed with fever. The windows in the room were closed, and judging by the stale and sour smell inside, they hadn’t been opened for days. “All of God’s creatures need light,” said Ella, throwing open the two windows in the room. “As if you, Isaac, of all people, were ignorant of that fact.” Ella fed him some chicken soup she’d cooked, and left him a potful of boiled beef on the stove. Charlie brought him a pint of his favorite scotch in a brown bag and placed it on the kitchen table. “This is for later, when you’re better,” he said.
Ella got a kick out of hearing about the Glenns—how they’d dart in, their eyes searching the corners of the store like bank robbers, and say something like, “One man’s poison is another man’s guilty pleasure,” before exploding into sharp bursts of laughter and rushing out again.
If it was close to the weekend, the university kids would come in—the frat boys with their cocky smiles and fake IDs, the grad students with their airs of indifference. Charlie had come to know many of them by name and sometimes they’d invite him to their parties. “C’mon, Charlie, take a busman’s holiday,” they’d say. “Thanks, but I’ve got to finish up here,” he’d answer. He knew they thought he was a queer one. Still, they confided in him their fears about flunking out or problems with girlfriends. Charlie Landy could keep a secret—that was for sure. Who was he going to tell anyway? He told Ella, of course, but she was only interested in the ones who got pregnant.
The Grists, Marilyn and Bill, dropped in from time to time when they needed a case of wine for a party. Nice people. She would always have a kind word about his father: “Every time I walk through this door I can hear your dad’s infectious laughter.” She continued to see his mother, even though by now, Charlie told Ella, he was certain it was more a chore than a pleasure. Bill would find a moment to come real close and whisper so Marilyn wouldn’t hear: “You know if you ever find yourself short of cash, or in any kind of trouble, I’m always here.” He knew the Grists were strapped for money and that it made Bill feel proud to hold out the offer. “Thanks Bill,” he’d say, grasping him by the shoulder. “It’s a comfort to know that.” He told Ella how he thought Bill felt responsible for him, since he was his dad’s friend from long ago.
Charlie told Ella everything but this: each time Tessie Lockhart came in he felt embarrassed, as if being near her stirred up the dis-orientation he felt being around her daughter. He also felt a little greedy, knowing that Tessie might talk about Dinah and in that way, bring another piece of her to him. Aside from that, or because of it, she was the customer he liked the best. She always seemed nervous and disorganized. “Just stocking up,” sh
e’d say, pulling four bottles of Almaden off the shelf. Charlie could tell when her married boyfriend, the Jai Alai mogul, was coming for dinner. She’d suddenly get particular about her choices, citing specific regions of France. “I need a champagne from the Loire Valley,” she’d say, her voice a little louder. (Tessie still nursed the belief that no one knew about her affair with the Baron.) But his favorite moments were when they would have one of their chats.
He would start by saying, “How’s my sister, your new daughter?” Tessie would pause, as if the question caught her off guard, then reach into her pocketbook for a pack of cigarettes and lighter. She’d hand Charlie the lighter and bend into the flame as she sucked in the burning nicotine. A ring of smoke would form a halo around her head after she exhaled. Then the conversation would begin.
“Did you ever have a best friend?”
“Not really. Well, Ella, but she kind of came with my life. Did you?”
“None except my husband. But the two of them, they know each other’s secrets and read each other’s minds like they come from the same womb.” She pushed the bangs off her forehead as if to clear the way for her next thought. “They carry in their heads the expectations their fathers had for them. And when they fight, it’s because one of them knows that the other isn’t meeting up to those expectations.” Until she said those words, Tessie had no idea she knew this.
“We keep people alive however we can, I guess,” he said.
“How do you keep your dad alive?”
“By taking care of my mother and Ella and Reggie under one roof. By doing the best I can. The truth is, it doesn’t seem enough. Does Crystal seem happy?”
