The Orange Blossom Special

by Betsy Carter

So Charlie had betrayed her too. She imagined their conversations: “Poor dumb Crystal, she doesn’t notice what’s going on right before her own eyes.” Even in the dark, her anger was palpable.

  “For Christ’s sake, Crystal, I was going to tell you. I’ve been in love with him for years. It’s only just recently that I found he loves me back.”

  “You’re in love with Charlie?” she asked incredulously. “Were you waiting until you were married and had kids before either one of you told me?”

  “Oh come on, Crystal, we just wanted to tell you when the time was right.”

  “Does everyone know but me?”

  “No,” said Dinah. “Just Ella.”

  “What about my mother?”

  “We’re waiting on that. You know, saving the best for last.”

  “No offense, but I don’t think you’re what my mother has in mind for Charlie.”

  Dinah tried to make her voice sound normal. “What does your mother have in mind for Charlie?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Crystal, turning on her side so she was facing Dinah. “But I’m guessing it’s not someone who is practically his sister.”

  “I know, it’s weird,” said Dinah.

  “It’s weird all right.”

  Lost in their private thoughts, the girls began drifting off into sleep. “I’ll bet your dad would like Huddie very much,” Dinah whispered.

  Crystal whispered back, “Your dad would love Charlie to death, I know he would. Umm, I didn’t mean to say it quite that way.”

  THIS SUNDAY MORNING, as on the two previous Sundays since the Harmon’s incident three weeks earlier, Charlie went with Ella to the Old Stone Baptist Church. Since the rock was thrown through his window, he’d been receiving threatening notes and hang-up phone calls. This church was one of the few places in town where he felt safe. On his first visit, Reverend Potts even talked about him in his sermon.

  “We endure our struggles with dignity and pride,” he had said. “As humans are, we are limited by fear and trepidation, yet we are also blessed with the will of the ages—to survive and carry on. All of us, God’s soldiers, are marching to His command. There are no heroes in His eyes. The only thing He demands is that we do our best and receive grace as it is given to us. Yesterday afternoon, during the unpleasant occurrences downtown with which you are all familiar, grace appeared in the form of a young man who had the courage to transcend his own nature and put his life in peril in order to protect two elders of this congregation. Had it not been for Charlie Landy . . .” Reverent Potts opened his large pink palm in Charlie’s direction . . . “Lord only knows what would have happened to our cherished sisters Ella Sykes and Pauline Brown. We give thanks for their safety and his presence. Please join me in welcoming Mr. Landy into our hearts and our prayers.”

  Maybe it was his six-foot-three-inch frame that caused the reverend’s slight stoop, or maybe he was swayed by all his years and what he had seen with his hard mahogany eyes. Reverend Jeremiah Potts was a leader in the community, one of the few black men whose voice was heard by all. To the white people of Gainesville, he was a man who could be reasoned with, a man whose wisdom and poise demanded respect. To his congregation, he was exemplary: a leader and a sage. He chose his words carefully and never said more than was necessary. After the service, Charlie felt the urge to talk with him. “Thank you for what you said in there, but there was nothing I did that anyone else wouldn’t do in the same circumstance,” he said. The reverend had folded his hands together as if he were washing them, then moved his lips before he spoke. “There’s a light that shines on you, Mr. Landy. Time is too precious. Don’t waste it.”

  “Reverend Potts, I don’t want to take too much of your time, but can I ask you something?”

  “Of course. Come, let’s take a little walk.” There was a stream that ran behind the church, just a trickle of water that shone copper in the sunlight. There was a wooden bench by the stream where Reverend Potts gestured they might sit. The reverend leaned back against the bench, crossed his legs, and took off his shoes. He rubbed his feet, one at a time. “By God, it’s 1962. You’d think by now someone would have invented shoes that molded to your feet, rather than the other way around. There’s a fortune to be made in the comfortable shoe business, I am certain of that.”

  “I know what you mean,” said Charlie. “I’m in a standing profession as well. By the end of the day my feet are just sore and burning.”

  Charlie would remember this conversation years later when he bought his first pair of Nikes, sorry that the Reverend Potts, now departed, would never have the chance.

  “Reverent Potts, did you always know you’d go into this business, you know, the preaching business?”

  By now the reverend had pulled off his socks and was resting his feet in the cool silt. “I knew that I had a connection to people and that I had something to say,” said Reverend Potts. “I also felt an easy connection to God. At church I got to know a lot of people and often they would seek me out to talk about their personal issues. It wasn’t any one thing that got me here; it was the only thing. It happened so naturally that I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know I’d be a preacher. What about you, Mr. Landy? What direction are you thinking of heading in?”

  “I’m trying to figure that out. I expect I’ll be drafted. There’s part of me that knows I have to get away from here, that it’s not my destiny to run a liquor store all my life. But now there’s this girl. I’m in love with her. She lives here and I don’t want to be away from her.”

  Reverent Potts flexed his feet in the water. “How much does she know about you?”

  “Everything and nothing.”

  “Mr. Landy, I don’t know much about you except that it’s clear to me you have a gift. That woman you talk about must see that gift. If she loves you, she will understand that you have to use it. She may not like where it takes you but if she loves you, she won’t stop you from doing what you have to do.”

  They sat quietly on that bench for a while. Then the reverend looked at his watch. “Sunday breakfast, I’m afraid I have to go. Good luck with the girl. I hope to see you back here next Sunday.”

  “I hope your feet feel better,” Charlie said. “And yes, I’ll see you next week.”

  ON THE FOLLOWING Sunday, Charlie sat through Reverend Potts’s sermon lost in thought: Dinah’s perfume, the freckles on her shoulders, the way she toyed with her hair when she read, each vision its own blessing. He wondered how people in love ever got any work done. He thought about Huddie and the draft and what he’d read in the library this week about Fort Wadsworth.

  After church, he asked Ella to walk with him down to the stream. They sat on the same bench on which he’d sat with the reverend. “You were right about one thing,” he began. “I am in love with her. With Dinah. Please don’t laugh.”

  “These old eyes, they see what’s there for them to see. That girl has always been the one for you.”

  “Is that all you have to say?” he asked.

  “What more is there to say?” she answered.

  Charlie squinted so that the space between his eyebrows pleated. “There’s something else I’ve been thinking. The other day, Huddie Harwood came to see me. He’s a good kid, but there are things he hasn’t figured out yet. We talked for a long time and he told me things he hadn’t told anyone else. Maybe I even helped him. It came natural to me.” He told her he knew he would soon be drafted and about his conversation with Reverend Potts the week before. And then he told her what had only come clear to him earlier that week: that there must be a way he could be in the army and do what he felt he was meant to do. He told her how he’d gone to the library and found that there was this place called Fort Wadsworth in New York City. “They have a program where you can train to be a chaplain in the army. I’m thinking I might try it. How does that sound?”

  To Ella it sounded frightening but final. She heard it in the firmness of his voice and saw it in the way he held his head forward,
not to the side as he did when he was asking a question. Charlie had already made up his mind. She knew she was supposed to feel happy, that Charlie was finding his calling. But she couldn’t ignore the shadow of fear that followed this knowledge: that he would also leave Gainesville. She would be left in that house with Mrs. Landy and Reggie. It was an unbearable thought—one that would only burden Charlie if he knew it. Ella vowed that he would never know it.

  WHEN SOMEONE YOU love has been taken from you, it is hard to believe that it won’t happen again. Each time she said goodbye to Charlie, Dinah had to fight back the feeling of terror that she might never see him again. And each time she laid eyes on him again, she considered it nothing short of a miracle. As he promised he would, Charlie came over after church. Dinah was watching from the window, waiting to catch sight of his old Pontiac. And when she did, she ran from the house to greet him. She stuck her head through the open window on the driver’s side of the car and kissed him on the cheek. “You’re here!” she cried, her voice fresh with surprise.

  “I told you I’d be here,” he said.

  “I know you did, but you actually showed up!”

  “I’ll always show up,” he said, “C’mon, get in.”

  They drove to the Ichetucknee River. As a child, Charlie would come here with his family. The smell of the spring-fed water brought back a memory of his father. He was lying on the grass with his head resting on his arm. His face was worry free and young then. They were eating egg sandwiches and drinking Dr Pepper, which his mother poured from a thermos into paper cups. When they finished, they got up to take a walk down by the river. Charlie noticed that his father’s arm was streaked with lines that went this way and that. He was too young to understand that they were just patterns of the grass imprinted on his father’s arm, and when he asked him what it was, his father studied his arm carefully before answering. “Oh, this? It’s a map of Ireland.”

  Charlie loved telling Dinah that story because it brought back his favorite thoughts about his dad, how funny and tender he could be, and how as a young boy, Charlie had hung on his every word. It never dawned on him until years later that it wasn’t a map of Ireland at all. Dinah laughed at his story then confessed to him that Crystal had told her version of it many times before. “Only the way she tells it, she asked your dad what was on his arm and he said it was a map of Sweden.”

  They sat down on the grass, and Charlie lay down on his side, assuming the same pose that his father had all those years ago. Dinah sat down cross-legged beside him.

  “So I told Ella,” he began. “She didn’t say much. She just said that she always knew that you were the one for me.” Dinah held his hand and rubbed her thumb back and forth over the knuckle on his thumb. His words and the sureness in his voice made her indescribably happy. When a baby sucks its thumb, it rubs the bridge of its nose back and forth as if to say, “I’ve staked out this place and I am safe here.” Dinah’s hand took ownership of Charlie’s thumb that way.

  “And Crystal? How did she react?”

  Dinah wondered how much she should tell him about their conversation, how hurtful it had been. “She was really upset that we hadn’t told her. She said that given you were almost my brother, the whole thing was a little weird.” That’s as much as she wanted to say.

  “And?” he asked.

  “And that’s pretty much it.”

  “So she thinks this is weird?”

  Charlie was like a dog sometimes. Dinah knew he wasn’t going to let go of the subject until he’d picked this bone dry. She supposed it was a compliment, the way he studied her words and held her accountable for them, but it was also an encumbrance. She took a deep breath. “I think it’s more than that. Crystal and I share everything—same classes, same house, same bedroom, my mother. You’re her big brother—the one thing she has that I don’t. She’s not in the mood for sharing you.”

  “But she’s got Huddie.”

  “That’s different, don’t you see?” Her voice went up a notch. “She knows I think Huddie’s kind of a clod. She idolizes you. You and Huddie are in entirely different leagues. You’re not even in the same ballpark.”

  He didn’t get it. “Let me understand. Crystal is worried that you and I are like brother and sister, so our relationship is kind of unnatural. Yet she’s upset that we’re together because, while she already has a boyfriend, I’m the real thing? What’s that if not a little weird?”

  Were all boys this dense, or was it just Charlie? “Don’t be silly, she’s gaga about Huddie.”

  Charlie buried his head in his arm, trying to figure out how she could obliterate his logic in one sentence. When he looked up again, there was hope in his eyes. “So then she doesn’t have strange feelings toward me?”

  “Forget it,” said Dinah. “She and Huddie will be married by the time we finish this conversation.”

  “She told you that?”

  “Told me what?”

  “About her and Huddie getting married.”

  Dinah nodded.

  “He told me that too. Did she also tell you that he wants to enlist in the army?”

  “No!”

  “I don’t think she knows yet,” he said. “We can’t tell her.”

  “The army? Why would anyone volunteer to go into the army?” She was grateful to be talking about something other than Crystal and weird relationships.

  “He’s got all kinds of reasons. The draft, his father, trying to do the right thing.”

  “Why doesn’t he just go work for the phone company, like everyone else in our class?”

  Charlie sat up. “That’s a pretty snotty thing to say, don’t you think?”

  “No. Most of them are nitwits who only care about football and beer anyway.”

  “Do you think only nitwits would join the army?”

  “Nitwits with suicidal tendencies.”

  “You’re in rare form today,” Charlie said. “Have you been spending time with my mother lately?”

  She knew that wasn’t a compliment. “Why, because I have an opinion that might not agree with one you’re having?” She had let go of his thumb by now.

  “Are we having a fight?” he asked.

  “We are having something in which you seem to be judging me for the way I see Huddie and all those other kids at school.”

  “Oh that. My mother has a word for it. She calls me ‘a prig’ when she thinks I’m acting self-righteous. It drives her crazy.”

  “I can see why,” said Dinah.

  A shadow of hurt crossed his face, only for an instant, but long enough for her never to want to see it again.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Please, let’s not ever fight again.”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “Everyone has disagreements from time to time.”

  Dinah folded her lips so they looked like a straight line in a stick-figure face. Then she said, “Not us. We’re not like everyone.”

  Charlie knew he was at an unfair disadvantage. He tried to convince himself that this was the perfect time to tell her his plans, but deep down inside he knew he’d always regret it if he did.

  WHEN CHARLIE RETURNED home that night, he found his mother and Reggie in the living room, hunched over a Scrabble board. “What kind of a word is ‘un’? There’s no such word as ‘un.’” His mother was shouting at Reggie.

  “Yes, ma’am, there is too,” he argued back. “I want un blanket,” he enunciated carefully. “Or, ‘she baked un apple pie.’ ”

  “Look it up,” demanded Victoria. She slammed the dictionary so hard next to him that his letters jumped out of their rack. He jumped too. “There’s no such a thing as ‘un blanket,’ or ‘un apple pie,’” she glared at him. “Honestly, why do I bother?”

  “Hi, Mom, hi, Reggie. Having fun?” he asked.

  “Me and Mrs. Landy playing Scrabble,” said Reggie. “We’re working on my spelling.”

  It amazed Charlie how Reggie was able to keep up his spirits in the face of his mother’s outbur
sts.

  “That’s good, Reggie,” said Charlie. “You’ll be a spelling bee champ if you keep this up.”

  Charlie leaned over his mother. “Can we talk? I have some news.”

  Victoria got a vague look in her eyes, then turned toward Reggie. “Reggie and I have some news too, don’t we Reggie?” she said, her voice going up and down like she was leading a singalong.

  “Yes we do,” said Reggie. “We sure do.”

  “Reggie and I saw Dr. Simons today.” Up and down, up and down. “Dr. Simons is going to make Reggie some teeth. He says it will take him about six months to finish a mouthful and that no one who ever meets Reggie afterward will ever be able to tell.”

  “It’s been so long since I’ve had teeth,” said Reggie. “Seems like I’ve been sucking food all my life.”

  “It’ll be great,” said Charlie, while studying his mother. Her hair had been freshly cut and teased by Jésus. Her nails were perfectly oval and pink as a baby’s blanket. She had more clothes in her closet than places to go in them, and however age chose to play itself out on her face she had some product to cover it. The thought struck Charlie that his mother had run out of ways to make herself over. Now she would work on Reggie.

  Again, he asked his mother if they could talk. “Darling, can’t it wait until we finish this game? I think he’s beginning to get the hang of it.”

  “It’s pretty important,” said Charlie. “But sure, finish your Scrabble game.”

  “Damn, I hate when you do that, Charlie Landy. Pulling that long face, and that pitiable tone. ‘But sure, finish your Scrabble game,’” she said in a voice that was petulant and unflattering. “What is so important that Reggie and I can’t even enjoy a little learning and recreation without you having to interrupt us? This better be good.”

  This wasn’t the time to argue with his mother or raise her temper. So he said what he had to say as neutrally as a TV weatherman. “I’ve decided that I’m going to become a chaplain in the army. I’m going to attend a school right outside of New York City. Then I’m going to enlist in the army. There, was that good enough?”