Land of Mango Sunsets, The

by Dorothea Benton Frank

  I combed out my wet hair, watching myself in the huge mirror that lined the wall behind the basin. My hair was getting longer. It was already well past my chin, skimming the collar of the old but still serviceable terry-cloth bathrobe I found in the closet. Maybe being satisfied in terry cloth was a little pitiful. Basically, it made me look lumpy. I wasn’t lumpy. I decided to let it drop to the floor around my ankles in a puddle in an act of defiance buoyed by false confidence. I had not looked at myself naked in quite some time.

  I was not the prettiest sight in town, to be sure.

  Embarrassed and feeling slightly panicked, I wondered if my figure was salvageable. I decided to assess it by region. My upper arms were sort of droopy but I knew they could be substantially improved with weight training. I had done it before; I could do it again. My stomach was not exactly taut. Was I too old for Pilates? What if I had a massive stroke while I was doing crunches? It would be a very stupid way to die. I looked at my breasts and inhaled to make them lift. They seemed reasonable, I thought, and in the next second it seemed absurd to refer to my breasts as reasonable. I mean, what did unreasonable ones look like? Are they argumentative pendulous melons?

  My thighs? Well, what can we say about anyone’s thighs? The only probable reason they weren’t completely cottage cheese was that I did a fair amount of walking. But I definitely didn’t walk enough to lose any weight.

  While I blew my hair dry I thought about Agnes Willis. She was as skinny as a supermodel. It was unnatural. She probably purged. Maybe she dined on laxatives. Maybe she took Truman’s wallet up to a plastic surgeon on Park Avenue and Eighty-sixth Street and got herself liposuctioned twice a year. God knows, her face was over-Botoxed and stretched like a drum. At that moment, I hated her guts.

  I looked at my war chest of cosmetics and realized that given the location and situation, Mother was right. They were inappropriate.

  I had planned to set my hair in some Velcros to get that Park Avenue Patty helmet going and then said, “Oh, to hell with that” to the thin air, and tossed the whole bag of them in the wastebasket, along with my bomb-shelter-size can of hair spray. Au naturel was the Island standard? They would get au naturel!

  I put some moisturizer on my face and a dab of pale pink gloss on my lips and looked in the mirror. Staring back at me was an anthropologist straight from the bush.

  What to wear? I looked through the clothes I had brought and decided to wear a cotton turtleneck that someone had left in the bottom drawer along with a pair of jeans that were one size smaller than mine. Then I shrouded myself in my own dependable oversize cable-knit cardigan that was at least ten years old. I slipped on my old loafers and took one last look in the mirror. Perfume? Nah. To hell with that, too. Jungle Woman did not concern herself with such trivia. If Charles could have seen me he might not have recognized me. Kevin would have roared. But, I looked younger somehow. I took this new persona downstairs, where Harrison Ford and my mother were preparing dinner. And I wondered for a moment about the nature of their friendship. It certainly seemed to me that she had more of a social life than I did, and that was truly not right.

  “Hi!” I said. “What can I do to help?”

  To say they stopped dead in their tracks would be an exaggeration, but I saw the glint of satisfaction in my mother’s eye and amusement in Mr. Ford’s. It was obvious I had successfully dressed to please.

  “You can help us drink this delicious bottle of scuppernong wine,” Harrison said, and handed me a goblet. “Here! Cheers!”

  “Thanks,” I said. It was cloyingly sweet, much sweeter than wine I was accustomed to, but I sipped it, not wanting to be rude. “It’s very nice.”

  “Harrison and his friend Butch made it!”

  “Really?” Why was I not surprised? There was a screw cap to the bottle and the label was handwritten. But I didn’t realize they grew grapes around Sullivans Island. “There’s a vineyard on the island?”

  “No, out on Wadmalaw,” he said. “Land’s cheaper.”

  His words were true enough. Although Wadmalaw was being gentrified and developed like every other stitch of coastline in the country, its interior farming environs were probably much cheaper than Sullivans Island and Kiawah, which were two of the most fashionable sandbars in America.

  “Right,” I said. “I remember going out there when I was a kid and buying vegetables. The dirt was very dark and cool.”

  “Were you barefoot?” he asked, as though he could not envision such a thing.

  “Of course! I had my flip-flop days, you know.” I narrowed my eyes at him and realized he was thoroughly amused. “Did you light the grill, Mother?”

  “No. I forgot. Why don’t you and Harrison do that for me?”

  “Sure thing,” he said, and refilled my glass.

  “Ah, Wadmalaw! It’s positively thriving with all the small farms out there that grow vegetables for the gourmet market. Somebody’s growing those fat little pygmy carrots for Thomas Keller’s kitchens,” Mother said. “I adore them! Until this year, I haven’t had much luck with them, but now I have a cold frame of them coming along.” She smiled and looked at me. “They are loaded with vitamins and antioxidants. Yummy little devils.”

  Mother continued to ramble about the merits of carrots and Harrison slid the door open for me to step out to the porch. The sun was hanging low and the color of, well you know, mangoes. Light streamed through the remaining wisps of cirrus clouds. The horizon held broad strokes of royal purple streaked with red and rose quartz and the sky was fast becoming lapis. Venus was there, and for a moment, I felt an urge to make a wish. All at once I was filled with wishes—that Charles would regret what he had done, that my boys would come back to me, that my life was happier, that I had someone to love—on and on my wishes went, one after another. I knew Harrison and I were supposed to be going down to the grill, but the sight was so powerful and my heart was so melancholy. Neither one of us moved. I suspected he was having similar thoughts. Finally, when the sun slipped away, we sighed and went down the steps.

  “Some sky, don’t you think?”

  “Well, Mr. Ford, when day becomes night around here, it’s no joke.”

  “You’re right, Mrs. Swanson. Every event of nature seems to be packed with drama.”

  “Mrs. Swanson?” The formality sounded too stiff.

  “Didn’t you just call me Mr. Ford?”

  “I guess I did, didn’t I?” I flipped the light switch on the post of the pergola that housed our grill, refrigerator, and ice maker and we were instantly washed in warm yellow light.

  Harrison threw back the hood of the grill with a clang. “Didn’t anybody ever give you a nickname?”

  “No. Well, when I was young, my girlfriends called me Mira or Mizzy.”

  Nodding and congenial, he reached in the cabinet, removing a brush and a small bottle of oil, perfectly at home, as though he had rummaged Mother’s cabinets a thousand times before. He probably had, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about this stranger being so familiar with my mother’s possessions. I was glad she had a friend, to be sure, and I supposed I was just being protective of her.

  As he neatly painted the grill with oil, I watched him from the side. Sun damage and crow’s-feet aside, he was actually quite handsome in profile. But he was dangerously short, so short that I could look him in the eye. But then, I was five seven. So maybe he was five eight or nine. But five eight wasn’t short. Charles had been six four. He was probably still six four. Five eight or nine was normal or even tall in many cultures. I snapped out of the height of my fog realizing that Harrison was talking to me. Height? Ah well, my humor is truly lame, but we already know that.

  “What? I’m sorry.”

  “I said, Mira?” he said. “Doesn’t suit you at all. What’s your full name?”

  “Miriam Elizabeth.”

  “I can’t see you as Mira. Nope.”

  “Right? A couple of my sandbox enemies tried to call me Mitzi and I broke their crayons.”
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br />   “I would have recycled them. You are definitely not a Mitzi.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?” Why didn’t he think I could have been called something lighthearted like Mitzi? No, he thought I was a lesbian storm trooper or something.

  “Well, Mitzi is, I don’t know, red-haired and freckled, a tomboy? Flouncing around? Ditzy? You’re too feminine to be a Mitzi.”

  “Oh. How about you?”

  “Nope. I’ve always been Harrison.”

  “I have a bird named Harry.”

  “I rest my case. Nicknames are not for everyone. But you should be Mellie—a little bit of Miriam and some Elizabeth. M and Ellie.”

  “Whatever you say…”

  It was a banal conversation, ridiculous actually. Who cared about nicknames? But that wasn’t the point. He was flirting with me. A man was flirting with me. At least it seemed so. I realized then that age difference aside, it might be important for me to understand the real nature of his relationship with Mother. Nah, they couldn’t be…

  The grill was fired up and warming. “I guess we should get some more wine,” he said. “Think of all the sober adults out there…”

  “Right,” I said, and we were caught in the whirlpool of each other’s eyes. I thought, Well, this is just too stupid for words, but I wasn’t going to be the first one to move away. The elixir of scuppernong grapes had emboldened me, and besides, I was a little bit fixated on what appeared to be double dimples in his cheeks. Or maybe it was the fading twilight, but I decided that Harrison was definitely not a character from The Old Man and the Sea. Who was this man anyway?

  “Right,” I said, repeating myself, and cleared my throat. “It’s turning into a beautiful evening, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, ma’am, Miss Mellie, it is.”

  Mellie. Okay. I could live with that.

  We sat down to expertly grilled fish, just drizzled with olive oil and lemon juice and generously sprinkled with chopped parsley. Mother had prepared tomatoes and onions into a sauce and spooned them over a nest of steaming rice. Of course, she had grown the tomatoes.

  “I still can’t give up white rice,” she said. “Brown rice is healthier, but my family’s been eating white rice for a thousand years and I’m not fooling around with tradition!”

  “Well said, Miss Josie,” Harrison said.

  I cleared my throat and said, “So, Harrison? Tell me about yourself. Is there a Mrs. Ford?”

  “There was but she left me, oh, I guess it was a dozen years ago. Ran off with my favorite golfing buddy.”

  “Good grief! That’s awful!”

  “Yeah, it was. But you can get over anything in time, I think. Said I worked too much and I probably did.”

  “She was a fool,” Mother said. “And so was Miriam’s husband, Charles.”

  “You mean Mellie,” Harrison said. “I gave her a new name.”

  “Oh? Well, why not? Mellie. I love it!”

  I could feel my heat rising and knew that my estrogen shortage was probably obvious.

  “Charles was indulging in the classic midlife crisis and I let him go have his adventure. We had some good years, though, and he gave me two gorgeous, sweet grown sons. Do you have children?” I gritted my teeth as my lie about my sweet sons and the good years slipped between them. “By the way, the fish is unbelievable.”

  “More?” Mother said, and moved to serve another portion to me before I could respond.

  “Thanks. Yep. One daughter. Louisa. She works in Costa Rica, teaching English and health. She’s married to a great guy. No children, though. I don’t quite understand that, but having children is their business.”

  “It’s a different world out there today than when I was a young woman,” Mother said. “I’m not so sure I’d have the courage to raise children in all this insanity. More rice, Harrison? Mellie?”

  “Thanks, yes. Miss Josie? You are absolutely right. The world is a crazy place.”

  We continued eating until nearly everything was gone. Harrison, after some prodding, talked about his recycling work—apparently he and Mother were the reigning royalty of the Lowcountry movement not only to conserve and reuse but also to raise awareness of how easy it was to incorporate these practices into daily life.

  “If each person just did one thing, think what a difference that could make,” Mother said.

  “You’re preaching to the choir, Miss Josie. Why don’t I clear the table and then squire you ladies down to the beach for a little walk to shake it all down. It’s so bright we can probably see cabdrivers in Lisbon.”

  We put all the dishes in the sink, covered them with hot suds, laughing about the numbers of eyeglasses, toothbrushes, and sneakers they had gathered in the past year. Their projects were mildly interesting if not actually remarkable. Even to a dedicated skeptic like me.

  The cleanup was fast and Harrison poured out some of a second bottle of wine. We had not had enough wine to be tipsy, but just enough to feel relaxed and happy. We bundled up in jackets and gloves and rode over to Station Eighteen in Harrison’s Mercury Mountaineer. He opened the sunroof and I began to let my mind drift as I took in the natural beauty above me.

  When we parked, Harrison helped Mother down from her seat and then held out a hand for me. I could feel his strength as he held my elbow and knew that he would never have let either of us fall. It had been forever since I had felt the grip of any man besides Kevin, who was a dear, to be sure, but he did not elicit the same response from my nervous system as Harrison. I blushed again, hoped he could not see it in the dark and wondered what was going on with me. Was I having an episode of “Any Port in a Storm”?

  The night was crystal clear and there were countless stars overhead, sparkling and multiplying as our eyes adjusted to the darkness. It was chilly but invigorating to be in the salty night breeze. We moved through the white dunes, pristine even in the dead of night, and began walking east. The tide was low but sliding in quickly enough to be the perfect background music—rising with a muffled roar and receding in whispers. The phosphorus ocean sparkled and in the reflection of its dazzle we found our voices again.

  “Tell me more about you,” I said in what I considered to be a rather bold move.

  “Me?” Harrison said. “Well, I spent twenty years in investment banking and did all right.”

  “He made a killing,” Mother said. “Don’t let him fool you.”

  “Mother!” Sometimes my mother’s mouth was a loose cannon.

  “That’s okay. Anyway, when my wife told me she preferred my best friend’s bed to mine, I threw my golf clubs in the Ashepoo River and took up fishing. Fishing is good for the soul. Gives you time to think.”

  “I imagine so,” I said.

  “So after I settled here and as time went on I started finding out about mercury levels in the water, hence in the seafood. Then it was chemical runoff from parking lots into the water supply and into the seafood. We’re basically poisoning ourselves. Then I guess it was just waste that was bugging me—you know, we are such a wasteful society—all the landfills and so on. Anyway, those were the beginning thoughts that made me want to change my life and to help clean up and preserve the world around me. Just quit wasting stuff, you know?”

  He and Mother seemed to share in this wacky concept of living green, but more important, living without the commercial trappings of the world over the causeway.

  “So, you don’t watch television?” I said, teasing a little. “No Desperate Housewives?”

  “No, of course I watch television. Just not for hours on end, that’s all. And needless to say, I’m not interested in desperate housewives, or desperate anybody, for that matter.”

  “Understood. Me either.” I wondered if I came off as desperate. “Well, do you use electricity?”

  “Yes, of course. Of course I do. But very little. In fact, I’ve been kicking around a small windmill test project for the island.”

  “Harrison is absolutely brilliant, Miriam. Lots of people have gene
rators that run on fossil fuel but Harrison wants to use the wind. Think about it. How much wind do we get in a hurricane? A lot. Or even when it’s coming in from the east? We’ve been using solar panels for years, but windmills are so beautiful and peaceful. I wouldn’t mind seeing them in the landscape.”

  Was there a twinkle in Mother’s eye? Was she his…no way!

  “Well, to date, we’re not getting very far,” Harrison said. “We need to come up with a turbine that can produce power at a steady average wind speed. So far, no luck.”

  “Meaning?” I said. My throat tightened at the actual possibility of Mother and Harrison together.

  “I’m putting my energy into other things—like opening a flex fuel station in Mount Pleasant so we can pump E-85 fuel. And photovoltaic systems.”

  “Photo what?”

  “Solar cells.”

  “Ah. Right. What was I thinking? I thought you were a nice retired banker just catching a few fish now and then,” I said.

  I could see him smiling in the dark.

  “Banking was another life. I like this one better. It might actually do some good.”

  I thought about what he said and decided Mother was right—he was an interesting man. And he may have been flirting a little with me, but I was sure then it was unintentional and meaningless. Obviously, I had misread his signals. He was Mother’s friend and I was pretty sure more. My heart sank from my own vanity. But honestly, I was very glad that Mother had someone in her life. Besides, could I truly envision this guy at a gala in New York? How about never?

  Anyway, saving the planet was a good idea. It was surely a fact that most of the population did not live in sync with nature. At all. I had endured prolonged blackouts in New York and always worried about the people on life support. Worse, I worried about old people who lived on high floors of apartment buildings and how they would go out for groceries. Would they simply die of heart attacks trying to get home, climbing forty flights of steps? It was a dark subject to ponder.

  I said, “Well, windmills are certainly more aesthetic than those horrible open transformer substations and those huge buzzing towers that we always suspected gave people brain cancer.”