by Lisa Samson
So I opened the cabinet in the laundry room and pulled down a bedspread from the seventies when Mrs. Summerville took one of the guest rooms and made it look like “George Washington Slept Here.” Those little bumps all over it hung like miniature nooses now, and the whole thing reminded me of a mangy sheep dog. The paint splatters didn’t help any.
I spread it on the floor of the den and hightailed it back to the kitchen. I needed to get to the grocery store soon. Fresh spinach. We’d try out a new recipe I found on the Internet the night before. Parmesan spinach dip. And it called for fresh spinach. Not canned or frozen.
Must be a recipe by one of those snooty chefs.
Even made my own Melba toast to go with it real early this morning. Couldn’t sleep last night. These girls worry me. I have to say Mrs. Summerville shocked me with that statement about my Sinclair. That encouraged me. Lark and Sinclair? An indulgent thought? Of course, Sinclair, who looks on Lark as a little sister will laugh himself silly when I tell him what she said.
Lark sat at the table finishing breakfast. “I’m crazy, Prisma.”
“Yes, you are.”
“I’m crazy to let you two do this to me.”
“Well, now, as I see it, that is not the truth. As I see it, it’s been long overdue. Now I don’t like sitting around wasting my time talking about hair like most women do. Just get in there and let Baby Girl work her magic. I’ve got work to do.”
“For some crazy reason, Miss Long Braid, I thought you’d be on my side here.” Lark stood to her feet and gathered her plate and utensils. She made for the sink. “I mean, you’ve been wearing your hair like that ever since I can remember.”
I just stared at her for a moment and wanted to cry. I thought about that buffoon Bradley and her crazy love for him. I thought of the early years after she came back from San Francisco, the way I’d go downtown sometimes to hear her practice with those awful rock bands. Then the nail salon. Then the church. And I’d place Baby Girl right there by her side to grow up beautiful, just like a Summerville should.
Do they begin to realize how good it would be if they let it? Do they realize how good life really is?
Well, Baby Girl does. I’d swear there are Percy genes in that child somewhere, for she’s the only one with a lick of sense.
“Didn’t you hear me, Prisma? I thought you’d be on my side.”
“I am. Which is why I think it’s high time you let somebody do something nice for you. You can’t be your own savior forever.”
“That’s not fair, Prisma! You know I don’t feel that way about myself.”
“Well, maybe you don’t feel that way, Lark, but you sure do act it.”
“I’ve been trying to serve God for years. And then my house burns down after all I gave up to try and take responsibility for my life.”
Poor baby. Oh well, Lord, I’ll let her have it if You say so. “Maybe it’s never been about giving things up, Lark.”
“But the Bible says, ‘Deny yourself, take up your cross and follow Me.’ ”
“And what does that mean exactly, Miss Smarty-pants?”
Lark’s eyes filled with tears as Baby Girl hollered in from the den. “Come on, Mom! Grandy and I are waiting.”
Quicker than a flash, Lark turned, pushed through the swinging door, and disappeared from view.
I turned on the water. “Well, Jesus, did I say it right?”
“She’s forsaken her primary mission field, My girl.”
“Mrs. Summerville, right? I figured as much. Don’t know why I didn’t see it sooner.”
“So what’re you gonna do about it, Prisma Ophelia Percy?”
“Pray.”
“And?”
“Well, I don’t know, Lord. I suppose You’ll send Your Spirit to guide me.”
And Jesus said, “You got that right.”
Thing is, I don’t know if my conversations with the Lord are real, but I hear Him guiding me, deep down inside. And there are things I know I’m supposed to do, and there are matters here at Stoneleigh House, matters He’s put in my hands, that need tending.
“Lord,” I prayed, “I know You’re working. I just know it. Help me to know what to do.”
Now, that is a prayer I know He’ll answer.
Truth be told, Lark hasn’t looked this good in years. Baby Girl used some kind of new gunk people use these days, and, honest to Pete, Lark’s lost ten years off her looks. We all stood around the hall mirror, even Mrs. Summerville.
“You know, Larkspur, I might even get my hair colored, that looks so good!”
I sucked in my breath quietly.
“You really like it, Mother?” She ran her fingers through loose curls, curls that Baby Girl had coaxed with a curling iron as thick as a fence post.
“Of course. What’s not to like? Sweet Pea sure knows hair.”
“I’ll do it whenever you want, Grandy.”
Lark ran a hand over the soft blond streaks. “The color isn’t too much?”
“Not at all,” Leslie said, growing more and more tired. I could tell by the way she leaned heavily on the hall table.
“Well, let’s celebrate!” I clapped my hands twice. “It’s hors d’oeuvres for lunch! The Giant was just burgeoning this morning with all sorts of good things.”
“Oh good!” Baby Girl made for the dining room, where I had arranged quite a spread while the beauty parlor had been in session. “Did you make any Li’l Smokies?”
“Sure did! And don’t you worry, Mrs. Summerville, I did a low-fat version for you.”
“My mama would die all over again if she knew how much her daughter loves cocktail weenies!” Leslie laughed and looked ten years younger, just like Lark.
Unfortunately, she only ate two before she said, “What a morning! Too much excitement for me. Would you all be upset if I went up and took a nap?”
“No, Mother, of course not.”
“Are you okay, Grandy?”
“Of course! Now don’t get worried. I just didn’t sleep well last night is all.”
Only 1:30. Too early for a nap.
The girls offered to help me clean up the kitchen, and I let them know the pantry needed a little rearranging. We shouted back and forth. Laughing. Joking. Just being the folks of the house.
I’ve lived here for fifty years, and I’ve always found it wonderful the way a new hairdo can perk up life in general.
Hours later I decided to sit in the garden with a cup of tea and my Bible. Lark left at four o’clock to go to play for mass, and Flannery said she’d drop her off on the way to work. Then comes her dinner with that Bradley. Mrs. Summerville is sleeping, and the quiet empties me, leaving waves of sadness licking at my toes.
How about your gold slippers for the afternoon, Prisma? It won’t hurt just this once.
Live a little.
July is almost over, and this afternoon I am thankful for many things: the fact that nobody spilled hair goop where it has no business being, the last lemon bar in the freezer, Asil’s new girlfriend. He hasn’t been in my hair for a week now. I’m thankful most for the Holy Spirit’s leading. And I’d be lying if I wasn’t tickled about my computer at my desk. The Internet will never be the same now that Prisma Percy has a cable modem! Yesterday I sent a check to a local rescue mission here in Baltimore. What a work they do with men there! In fact, years and years ago they sent Asil our way. But I try not to bring that up. A man deserves to keep the dignity he’s worked so hard to earn.
I looked up at the heavens, saw the breeze chasing clouds across the sky. I saw the sun, and I swear I heard Jimmy’s voice saying, “Soon, Prissy, we’ll get to be together again.”
I’m hoping that “soon” is not the “thousand years is but a day in Your sight, O Lord” kind of soon. These knees aren’t bad, but they sure won’t hold up that long.
Lark
I SHUT THE DOOR OF FLANNERY’S CAR and waved as she drove away from St. Dominic’s. What is happening to me? My hands smoothed my black skirt, and I
rubbed the fabric of the new silk blouse Flannery brought home.
“On sale, Mom! $10.99!”
Pale pink.
I showed it to Mother the night before and once again received her approval.
“I have just the thing, Larkspur.” She hurried over to her jewel case, carefully pulled open the third drawer down, reached in, and turned around.
“Oh, Mother! Are you sure?”
“Positively. Here.” And she extended a two-strand pearl choker with a diamond clasp. “It was my Mama’s.”
“I’ve never seen you wear this.”
“I never have. I didn’t get it until after she died. And by then …” She shrugged. “Well, your father had given me plenty of my own, and …”
And she was avoiding something to be sure.
“How come you don’t talk much about your mother?”
Now, oddly enough, I never once met my maternal grandmother, Libby Lee Strawbridge. Mother and Daddy would visit Virginia, leaving Newly and me in the care of Prisma and Jimmy. But never once did they take me.
My mother’s eyes filled with tears. “That story is for another day, Larkspur. You’ve got enough on your mind already.”
I focused on my shoes, fighting my own tears. Would she never trust me with her heart? But I smiled bravely and lifted up the necklace. “Would you help me?” She never objected to that.
“Of course.” Her cool fingers brushed the back of my neck beneath my new “signature” bun. Ha-ha. “And let’s not forget the earrings!” She seemed almost girlish again as she scooted back to the case.
I threaded the simple drops in my ears and turned to face her. “What do you think?”
I waited, wincing inside.
“I think you’re something, Larkspur Summerville. I think you look beautiful. But then I’ve always thought you were one of the prettiest things I’d ever seen.”
And I think she really meant it. Even before my visit to Flannery’s House of Hair.
In that ensemble I walked out of St. Dominic’s to find a limousine waiting. Oh my word! Brad quickly jumped out of the car before the driver could circle. “Lark!”
“Hi, Brad.” Oh man. How was I going to explain this to the denizens of the 3 B’s?
“Get on in. We’ve got reservations for 8:30.”
“Just as long as I’m back home by 10:30. That’s when my calls really start coming in.”
“No problem. I love your hairdo, babe.”
“Flannery colored it.”
“No kidding. She must be something.”
And we zoomed away from the church, and I felt like I had on a going-away outfit, my groom smiling beside me.
Oh, Lark. I sighed within. Oh, baby. Don’t do this to yourself. Now would be a really, really good time to get scared.
Flannery
“UNCLE NEWLY?”
“Hello, Buddy.”
“Guess what?”
“What?”
“I know you’ve been holding out on me.”
Silence.
“Aren’t you going to ask about what, Uncle Newly?”
He chuckled. “Well, Buddy. I am sitting here wondering which portion of my very private life you’ve stumbled upon.”
“You and that girlfriend are getting serious.”
“No!”
I laughed.
“You don’t say!” he tried unsuccessfully to sound shocked.
“You’re a horrible actor!”
“Yes, you’re exactly right. So how did you come to this stunning conclusion?”
“I saw you.”
“You did? Where?”
“I was down by Maryland Institute just walking around the grounds, to get a feel of the place, you know. And I saw you go into the Lyric with her. You guys were holding hands in a very familiar, comfy way and you were smiling, Uncle Newly. And it wasn’t your usual smile.”
“How do you know it was me?”
“Oh, Uncle Newly, you crack me up! An albino wearing Brooks Brothers stuff? Who else would it be?”
He chuckled. “I talked to Grandy the other day. How does she look to you?”
“Tired, and I realize you’re changing the subject. I think she looks very tired.”
“That’s what I thought. Too tired for me to take her out to dinner sometime soon?”
I pause. “Didn’t you guys just go to lunch recently?”
“Yes. I wasn’t in a good mood.”
“Oh, Uncle Newly! Poor Grandy! And she was so excited.”
Silence.
Oh brother. I hate when he does that. “So anyway, you trying to make amends?”
“Perhaps.”
“Are you on something?”
“Not really, Buddy. Do you know how old I am?”
I calculated. Five years younger than Mom, who was forty-one.
“Thirty-six?”
“Yes. How long have I been thirty-six?”
Oh no. I had no idea. “I have no idea.”
“Precisely.”
“Okay. So I don’t know your birthday.”
“So typical it makes me want to puke.”
“You sound like a Monty Python guy. They say puke all the time.”
“It’s a good word for this situation.”
I gripped the phone. “Think of it this way, Uncle Newly. At least you’ve realized your neglect of the important things at thirty-six. I’d say that’s pretty young.”
“Well, Buddy, leave it to you to look at the bright side.”
Yep, Uncle Newly was right about that. I’m definitely the keeper of the bright side in this family.
Lark
I WANTED TO CRY. For Bradley. For me. For Flannery, and even for Rhonda.
We sat on the hood of the limousine. Before us, a vast pool in the night, rested Loch Raven Reservoir. Oaks and pines guarded the banks to our right and to our left, but where we sat, near the dam, the water moved before our eyes, sliding underneath the dome of stars before softly succumbing to concrete man’s construction. The water hissed softly as it fell.
This wasn’t Hoover Dam or Niagara Falls. It was just Loch Raven, a lovers’ lane and the place I gave myself to Bradley twenty-three years earlier. Often I used to think about lovers’ lanes and how lovers’ lanes all over the country change lives for good. Create lives forever.
Yes, everyone looks back on their life and sees events, rolls them around in the years they’ve lived since, and longs for a fairy godmother to make it all right. Yet sometimes? Well, we can see our actions as ingredients, ingredients in and of themselves destined for nothing more than a mud pie or a worm sandwich. But what happens? God steps in. I know it sounds corny. But I realized, sitting there with my ex-husband, that even the messiest scenarios deserve redemption.
Deserve?
Well, maybe not. But that’s what makes grace grace.
Already the story of a commitment I never knew possible flowed out of Bradley del Champ. About a marriage turned rockier than anything he and I ever experienced. “But by then she was pretty sick. I mean, how do you leave a dying person?”
“So the marriage was basically over?”
“Years ago. Well, the love part anyway.”
He paused, fiddling with an amulet he wore around his neck. Ga-roo-vey.
“Actually, maybe that was really the part that stayed. I guess it was the passion, the infatuation and all, that left. You know what I mean?”
I nodded. Not from experience, mind you. When Bradley rode out of my life, I remembered thinking not a week before how unbelievably attractive he was, how talented, how amazing. But nevertheless, I knew what he meant. “So you stuck it out.”
“Like I said, she was dying, Lark.”
“Was there anybody else in the meantime, during her illness?”
“There could have been, believe me.”
“Groupies?”
“Uh-huh.”
“So, was there?”
He shook his head. “Once. It was horrible. Not the sex, but the
next day after I went home and learned Rhonda was going to have part of her foot taken off.”
“Oh my word.”
“Yeah. The guys in the band, we have this running joke. ‘Do nothing to make us prime candidates for Behind the Music!’ ”
I laughed. “Sex, drugs, and rock-’n’-roll.”
“Yeah.”
“So what you’re saying is that it’s really all about the music now?”
He let out a hoot. “No. It’s still about the notoriety. But it’s not about the chicks anymore, babe.”
“Was it ever?”
“I hate to admit it, but yes.”
“And I messed that up for you.”
He shrugged. “Maybe you saved me. Who knows?”
“And then Rhonda picked up the baton.”
“Sort of. In her own way.”
The pool of darkness winked and waved, almost laughing at the years it had seen without mishap.
“Was it worth it?”
“No, babe. If I live to be a thousand, the memory of that drive out of our apartment complex will never stop beating me black and blue.”
“But you stayed away.”
“Yeah.”
“Despite Flannery?”
He shrugged. “There’s where I don’t know, babe. If I’d have left Rhonda, I’d have been the same old scoundrel. Yet to stay … I was still a scoundrel to you all. It was a no-win situation.”
“You can say that again.”
He didn’t. Thank the Lord.
“Have you ever driven around here when winter is fully bloomed?” I asked him.
He smiled, and I gazed at his profile. “Yeah. Pretty, isn’t it?”
“Yes. And the water still flows over the dam.”
“Yeah, it does. Those long wet streaks down the cement. But water won’t ever be completely contained, will it?”
“No. It’s like love, Bradley. Though frozen on top, there’s always a little left to fall over the edge.”
I wasn’t sure what I meant exactly. I mean, I wasn’t saying I was in love with him or anything. Because even if I was, time had done its marching and the band had moved from any field my feet would ever step across. But some form of love remained.
