The Orange Blossom Special

by Betsy Carter

  I have a new friend. His name is Eddie, and he’s black and white and rust colored, and the cutest thing I’ve ever seen. He makes me laugh and seems to understand things that I say. Have I mentioned he’s a kitten? I never understood about people and their pets, but I have a kind of love for him that makes me feel protected, loved, and less alone. He never disappoints me. Who knew?

  That night, for the first and only time ever, Eddie peed in her bed.

  “SHE LOVES THAT cat more than anything,” Dinah told Charlie a couple of weeks after Eddie arrived. “I know she loves me, and she probably even loves Crystal. But this is different. No matter what he does, even disgusting things like puking up hairballs on the couch, she thinks it’s cute.” They were sitting in Charlie’s car at the canoe outpost near High Springs.

  The first time they went out at night, he drove her home from the movies right afterward. This time, when the movie ended, he suggested High Springs, a favorite place to go parking. She’d visited him in the store every day for the past two years, and he’d seen her at her house at least once a week when he came to visit Crystal. But being with him alone in his car reminded her of the time she saw her math teacher, Mr. Halstead, walking down the street holding his son’s hand. Mr. Halstead was wearing shorts and sandals. She had never really known he had a kid, much less one whose hand he would hold. The whole thing, the shorts, the bare feet, the little boy, was intimate and embarrassing at the same time, which was exactly how she felt with Charlie now.

  “That’s what they say about animals, that they give you unconditional love,” Charlie said. “They don’t hold grudges, they don’t care how you look. They just live to love you.”

  Dinah stared at him and said nothing. He stared back. The Everly Brothers were singing “Devoted to You.” The music was sweet and the words made you want to believe that love could be forever. He put his arm around her and she softened into it. She was beautiful, Dinah, so full of spirit and life, like her curly fiery hair, which could never be completely tamed. He could see how her father came up with the name Boing Boing Girl. He imagined what his father felt like when he fell in love with his mother. The way he had told it, she was a fractious beauty in her day: wild, eccentric, already divorced at twenty-two. To her, Maynard must have seemed solid and safe and a world apart from the boys she had known. Charlie had never thought of either of his parents that way, but it must have been like this.

  He kissed Dinah. She brushed his cheeks with her fingers. He kissed her again and wrapped his arms around her, holding her as tight as it was possible to do. She put her arms around him and tried to pull him closer. They kissed and rocked back and forth through the Everly Brothers and at least three other songs. It was as if they had found this place of refuge after a long journey, and neither was about to let go.

  “I love you.” It was the first time he’d ever said those words to a girl.

  “I love you, too, Charlie. I’ve always known it, I guess, I just didn’t know what it was.”

  Her breath was warm on his face as she stared at him with expectation. He had no words. He said, “I’m sorry, I never get this tongue-tied.” She said, “Don’t be crazy. Besides, I feel the same way.” He kissed her again and their bodies folded into each other. For so many years they had watched each other and secretly reveled in the familiarity of a voice, a smell. Now it was as if someone finally opened the door and both of them were home. Dinah heard herself groaning, “Yes,” she said. “Yes. Please.”

  Suddenly, he got still and pulled back.

  “We should stop.” His voice was gravelly. “It isn’t right.”

  “I don’t care,” she whispered.

  “I do. I mean I don’t right now, but I do in the scheme of things.”

  “How can you think about the scheme of things at a time like this?”

  He sucked on the tips of her fingers then said, “I never stop thinking about them. Can you stand that?”

  “I can stand everything about you,” she said.

  On Saturday nights, Gainesville came alive. The fraternity houses were lit up and the music from their parties filled the streets. Charlie and Dinah drove down Fraternity Row, a beautiful street with giant oak trees, and old Victorian houses grown shabby from neglect. This is what I’m missing, thought Charlie at the same time that Dinah was wondering if Charlie was a little too perfect to be true.

  Out of habit, Charlie followed West University onto University Avenue, and went another four blocks past the liquor store. The first thing he noticed was the glass. It picked up the reflection of his headlights and shone like glitter. There was a giant hole where the front window used to be. Someone had shattered it with a rock. Charlie and Dinah got out of the car and walked toward the store. “This is just the beginning,” he said to Dinah. There had to be a punch line to the Harmon’s incident. Charlie knew that. He just didn’t think it would happen so fast.

  That night, he dreamed that he was standing in front of a room full of people and words were coming out of his mouth that weren’t his. He kept saying the words and afterward people came up and told him how much what he had said meant to them. The following night, he had the same dream and after that, the dream became part of the texture of his days and the puzzles of his night. What did it mean and why did it keep coming back?

  First thing Monday morning Huddie Harwood showed up. Huddie seemed smaller, more tentative than that day in the street.

  “Huddie Harwood, how glad I am to see you,” said Charlie, who was boarding up the window. He clapped him around the shoulder and shook his hand. “I owe you a big thanks for me and my friends. You really got us out of a jam. For all I know, you saved my life.”

  Huddie smiled his jagged smile. “It was nothing, Mr. Landy. Sorry about your window. Stupid hoods.”

  “Don’t go calling me Mr. Landy, buddy,” said Charlie. “As far as I’m concerned, after what you did, we’re friends forever.”

  “That’s what I came to talk to you about, sir,” said Huddie. “Well not exactly, but sort of.”

  Huddie looked so serious and tight with determination.

  “What say we take some of these chairs, have a beer, and sit out back?” said Charlie, trying to put him at ease. “C’mon, we can watch the loading dock at Florsheims.”

  They dragged out the two folding chairs and placed them on a mottled swath of grass. Charlie kept moving his chair to try to escape the sun, but there wasn’t a sliver of shade to be found.

  Huddie pressed his lips together, trying to figure out how to start. He took a swig from his beer.

  “It’s about your sister,” he said. “Crystal.”

  “Oh yes, my sister, Crystal. I know her well.”

  Huddie didn’t crack a smile. “Seeing as though you’re the man in the family—I mean, well your mother, um Mrs. Landy, is probably the head of the house, but you’re the only man—so anyway, your sister, Crystal. I love her very much and I wanted to tell you that I would like to marry her.”

  Huddie continued. “Well, of course we can’t get married right away, us both being in high school and all. But I’ve been thinking how when I graduate, I want to go into the army and serve my time. If Crystal will wait for me, then we could get married when I get back.”

  “Does Crystal know about any of this?” asked Charlie.

  “No, sir, at least not about the army part.”

  Every day, more soldiers were being shipped to Vietnam. Talk of the draft was hovering around young men like a virus. “Why do you want to go into the army?” asked Charlie.

  “Well, you know, to serve my country. The communists are getting closer and closer. I’ll get drafted, and besides, it’s my duty as an American.”

  Huddie was only five years younger than Charlie, but he seemed to Charlie like such a boy, a boy with an idealized version of what it was to be a man. The way he said those words, Charlie knew they weren’t his.

  “I’ll bet your dad is real gung ho about you going,” said Charlie.
<
br />   “You know my dad?” Huddie was startled.

  “No, but I’m guessing.”

  “My dad says that you go into the army a pussy and you come out a man. He says the only people who don’t go into the military are communists and Jews and that most of them are faggots anyway.”

  Charlie asked, “How does your dad feel about his son saving two black old ladies from a rowdy group of segregationists?”

  “Nothing personal, Mr. Landy, but you must think I’ve got no sense in me at all. There’s a lot of stuff I don’t tell my father, and what happened that day would be top of the list.”

  “Do you think your father ever thinks about you getting killed if you went into the army?”

  Huddie leaned forward in his chair and clasped his hands together. They stared in silence as two men got out of a truck across the way and unloaded a half a dozen boxes with the word Florsheims in big black type. Underneath it, in a hastily crayoned script, were the words penny loafers. Finally Charlie spoke. “My mother wants me to stay in Gainesville forever and run this liquor store. I don’t want to make her unhappy, but I know there’s more to life than this.” He pointed to the broken window. “It’s coming time for me to leave. Finally, it’s our lives. You know what I mean?”

  They watched the deliverymen get back into their truck. Huddie put his empty can of beer under his chair. He pulled a Zippo lighter and a crushed pack of Lucky Strikes from his back pocket and offered Charlie a smoke. Charlie liked everything about smoking: the flicking sound of the lighter as the flint caught fire, the way the tip of the cigarette turned the color of bubbling lava when it was first inhaled, the smell of burnt tobacco. People with cigarettes looked cool and reflective, as if in swallowing the smoke they had ingested some profound secret. He wished it didn’t burn his throat and make him choke. Smoking kept your hands busy and required attention. It passed as an activity which would have been perfect at a time like this when there was nothing left to say.

  “I don’t have to tell Crystal that we ever talked about any of this,” said Charlie. “And as far as I’m concerned, I can’t think of anyone I’d rather have for a brother-in-law.”

  For the first time that afternoon, Huddie Harwood smiled broadly. “I might like to marry her just so I can be related to you,” he said.

  “HUDDIE. WHAT A JERK,” said Dinah later that night, when Charlie told her that he’d seen him that afternoon. They were parked at their favorite spot near High Springs.

  “He’s not really,” said Charlie. “He’s kind of decent, if a little mixed up.”

  “I guess I feel protective about Crystal. I just worry that he’ll go off with one of those irritating Little Miss Pep Clubs and break her heart.”

  “I think you’ve got him wrong, Dinah. I think he really likes her.”

  “He better,” she said.

  Charlie wasn’t ready to talk to Dinah about his conversation with Huddie that afternoon and how much it had meant to him. He wasn’t even sure he knew why it had, other than it stirred something inside of him, something he couldn’t wait to talk about to Ella. But not to Dinah, not now.

  “So have you told Crystal about us?” he asked.

  “What should I tell her?” she teased.

  “That her brother has fallen for her best friend and that she’s turned his whole life upside down, though nobody would know it to look at him. You could tell her that for starters.”

  Dinah put her hand on his thigh. They kissed. They kissed again, pressing their lips so close together that the next day his lips were swollen and bruised. This time, their bodies knew what to do, where to go. And once again, it was Charlie who stopped them just when he felt he might lose control.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered, his mind drunk with the smell of her. “I can’t. I can’t now.”

  “Later maybe?” Dinah asked.

  “No, I’m serious. You’re not some girl to have sex with. To me it would have all these implications, responsibilities, and I just need to figure out a couple of things first. Does that make any sense?”

  “Have you told her?”

  “Have I told who what?” Now Dinah wasn’t making any sense.

  “Have you told Crystal about us?”

  “No, but I’ll make a deal with you. You tell Crystal tonight and I’ll pick you up tomorrow at one and you can tell me everything she said.”

  “Deal,” said Dinah. “Then you have to tell your mother.”

  WHEN DINAH CAME home that night, Tessie was out with Barone, and Crystal was with Huddie. Eddie was only vaguely interested in her arrival. “Hi, kitten face,” she said, picking him up by the scruff of his neck and placing him on her lap. “I might as well tell you,” she said, holding his paw in her hand. “I love Charlie Landy.” Eddie stared into her eyes and slightly cocked his head as if what she was saying were the most interesting thing he’d ever heard. “Can you believe it? Charlie Landy! And he loves me too. We’ve made out.” She lowered her voice. “Here’s the weird part. I’d go all the way with him in a minute. He’s the one who won’t.”

  Eddie had heard quite enough. He squirmed off her lap, and made a soft thud as the five toes of his front paws and the four of his hind paws hit the wooden floor.

  “Thanks a lot,” she called after him. “Gee, I’m not having a lot of luck with boys tonight, am I?”

  She brushed her teeth and got into her pajamas. As she lay in her bed, the same bed she’d been sleeping in since she was ten years old, she remembered how big this bed used to seem to her. In her worst days, it was her world: the miles and miles of cotton sheets, and the worn ribbon around the edges of her blue blanket, her flat pillow with the brown sweat stains in the middle indented part. These were the parameters of her safe place, the place she longed for during the day at school and where she retreated gratefully and willingly in the late afternoons. The outside world in those days was distant and scary and her connections to it were as fragile as spider legs. Now this bed was too small—too short for her long legs, too cramped for her oversized dreams. The things she’d done with Charlie, they were womanly things, not girl things. She loved him. She was in love with a boy and yearned to have sex with him, even marry him. Could the little girl who so often hid in this bed ever have imagined she’d have these thoughts? She wondered about her father and what he’d say about all this, though it embarrassed her to think that he would know. Would he even recognize her, so grown up? She supposed that he would. Just because he was dead didn’t mean he’d lose sight of her. If she saw him now, would he be fatter, have less hair, be stooped over, or would he look the way he had the last time she saw him?

  Jeez, it was past midnight. Where was Crystal? Dinah wished she’d come home already. She’d force herself to stay awake until she did.

  An hour later, Crystal tiptoed into their bedroom and slowly, silently started to undress. Dinah watched her for a while, pretending to be asleep, then said in a hushed voice, “Don’t be quiet on my account.”

  “Holy moley!” Crystal jumped. “You might warn a person before you go spying on them in the dark.”

  “I wasn’t spying, I was just resting,” laughed Dinah. “So how was your date?”

  “Huddie.” said Crystal, her voice melting. “I love him so much. If I tell you something, you promise not to tell anyone?”

  “Promise.”

  “Huddie and me, we’re talking about getting married. Not right away, of course, but after I go to college.”

  In the gray shadows of the night, Dinah could see Crystal’s profile. Her eyes were half closed and she was smiling as if she were listening to beautiful music. “Have you and Huddie done it?” whispered Dinah. “You know, gone all the way?”

  Crystal didn’t change her expression. After a time, Dinah asked her again. “C’mon, you can tell me. You’ve done it, haven’t you?”

  “Huddie and I love each other, and it’s the most beautiful thing in the world.”

  Crystal devoured mushy romance comics and it was
right out of those comic books, the way she talked about Huddie. Normally, it drove Dinah crazy, but tonight she was so caught up in her own melodrama she didn’t even notice. Instead, she shared an intimacy of her own. “If I stay a virgin any longer, I swear I’ll break out all over. Does it hurt the first time?”

  “The thing is, you’re so passionate that even if it hurts a little, you don’t care.”

  “Mmm,” said Dinah, curling on her side and placing her hands between her knees. “It sounds wonderful.”

  “It is wonderful,” said Crystal. “Huddie is wonderful. I am head over heels.”

  “That’s great, Crystal, it really is. He seems, um, nice.” Dinah was suddenly out of the comic books and back into real life.

  “Phh. ‘Nice.’ I know you think he’s just some dumb jock.”

  “No, really. Charlie thinks he’s terrific. And he was so brave when he rescued him and Ella and her friend.”

  “Yeah he was. But how do you know Charlie thinks he’s terrific?”

  “He told me.”

  “Since when do you and Charlie have so much to talk about?” Her voice was chilly. Crystal didn’t like the way she’d said Charlie’s name; something about the way it lingered on her tongue and came out in three syllables instead of two. “Cha-ar-lie.”

  Now it was Dinah’s turn to get comic-book coy. “There’s something I’ve been wanting to tell you. It’s about Charlie and me. We’ve been seeing each other. You know, privately.”

  “Privately? What do you mean you’re seeing Charlie privately?”

  “We’ve been out on dates. I’ve been having lunch at the store with him for about a year. Stuff like that.” Crystal was jolted out of her Huddie haze. Dinah could see she was blinking hard, trying to hold back tears. Charlie was her brother, the one normal, living person in her family whom she liked. Of course she’d want to keep him to herself. How could Dinah have not thought of that before?

  “Stuff like that,” repeated Crystal, as if each word were an invasion. “Exactly how much of him have you seen privately?”