“Hello, world,” he said. He saw that she was watching him. “Move over.”
She did so. His breath was stale, as, she knew, was her own. It didn’t matter. It was deliciously part of their intimacy When he moved inside her she marveled at the ease of it, how well it seemed designed, all of it: their motions, the way her own flesh seemed to pull at him as he withdrew partly, and the way she seemed to divide, with such a lovely relenting, as he pushed back in. She stretched her arms straight up, and then closed them around his neck, raising her hips to take him deeper, then arching her back, moving her hips downward, putting a wonderful-feeling pressure on him. He came with the low utterance of a word she didn’t hear, moving so fast now she thought about the noise they were making. He kept going, and she held him, letting go inside, falling through. He had let himself rest on her, so that she was looking over his shoulder at the springs of the bed above. When he stopped, he raised his upper body and looked down at her.
“Oh, baby.”
“Good morning,” she said.
He withdrew, and lay beside her, but he was partway off the bed. It wasn’t going to be possible to hold each other. He got up and went uncertainly, with the motion of the train, into the little cubicle of a bathroom. “Help,” he said in mock alarm, pitching forward and laughing. “Oh, God, I pity the poor sailors out at sea on a rocky day like this.” The door closed. She lay quite still, laughing, feeling the moistness between her legs and marveling at the fact that she was here.
The train slowed. They were coming into a town. There were other tracks now, and a station platform, and beyond that a clutch of tall buildings drenched in sun.
The sun hurt her eyes. She put one hand up to shade them, and felt the heat of it through the glass. A station platform glided by, and gave way to rows of tenement houses with porches and balconies, adorned with greenery and flowers, and draped, some of them, with laundry. There were laundry lines in the little fenced-in spaces, and a litter of toys, broken-down cars, bicycles, parts of cars, household goods. She saw a refrigerator with its door off and, a few yards farther on, a claw-footed bathtub with copper-colored stains on it.
Tyler came out of the bathroom, toweling off. “Better hurry,” he said. “They’ll be serving breakfast in a few minutes.”
“Peggy’s pregnant,” she said. She had not even been thinking about it.
“Peggy—” He seemed puzzled for a beat. “Oh, right. Peggy. Really?”
“She hasn’t told my father.”
“Jesus.” He stared.
She stood up with the blanket around her. The room was so small that they had to negotiate her moving around him. He took her by the upper arms and kissed her, and his mouth tasted minty from the toothpaste.
“I’m sorry. I should’ve told you about it before now.”
“I feel sorry for your mom,” he said.
“I didn’t tell her, either. She doesn’t know yet.”
“Lily—” he said, and seemed to hesitate.
“Tell me,” she said.
He kissed her again, and then held her face in his hands. “I love you.”
She dropped the blanket and put her arms around his neck. She had the thought: We’re a match for anything. We’re going to be so good.
He touched her hips, and she moved farther around him, to the doorway of the bathroom. “I’ll be right out,” she said.
In the dining car, they sat across from each other in a booth, and he reached across the table and took her hands. He looked at the other people in the car, then took a breath and squeezed her hands. “I slept wonderfully. How about you?”
She smiled. “I’m too excited to sleep.”
He sat back, and she watched the way his eyes took in everything.
“Tell me about your father. Would I have liked him?”
Tyler frowned, concentrating. “He was kind of hard to figure sometimes. What some people call a man’s man from the outside, but then in close—well. There was a soft spot, like a flaw in a piece of metal. I don’t mean that as harshly as it sounds.” He looked down at where his fingers were folding and refolding the edge of the doily in the center of the table. “He was moody. He had some strange aspects, like anyone. Well, maybe more than just anyone.”
“The business about the baseball.”
“That and some other things.” He kept toying with the doily. “We got along all right.” He sat back. “What’s the line from Hamlet? ‘He was a man, take him for all in all. I shall not look upon his like again.’ He wasn’t for everybody—including my mother, apparently.”
3
THE TRAIN RUMBLED into Oxford in mid-morning. It was bright and hot in the station, and there was a smell of oil and tar in the air. Beyond the confines of the building, everything was blooming. Lily saw a high green hill dotted with white flowers, a million flecks of snow. Across the top of the hill, houses were ranged, dark-wood balconies festooned with potted plants and wild ivy, splashes of red, violet, and saffron. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Sheri was waiting for them at the far end of the platform. She wore a soft-blue dress and a wide-brimmed straw hat that she held on her head with one hand in the blustery warm wind.
“If you two don’t look as fresh as new money,” she said, embracing Lily. “I’m so ecstatic.”
“You look like you ought to be in Gone With the Wind, wearing that hat,” said Tyler.
“Listen, this hat’s about to be gone with the wind.” She took it off as the wind gusted, and her hair covered her face. She stood there before them, arms at her sides, humorously resigned. It was charming. When the wind stopped, each soft blond strand slid in a lovely languidness back into place. “I can see again,” she said.
They waited for the porter to unload the bags. It surprised Lily, how good she felt seeing Sheri, whose eyes were so welcoming and friendly.
The porter loaded their bags onto a cart, and Tyler tipped him, then pushed the cart along the platform, through the station, and out to Sheri’s car. The station was all brown surfaces—polished oak wainscoting, wooden benches, and a wooden wall with a ticket window in it. Lily saw the young, long-faced man behind the bars of the window, and the man followed her with his gaze, as though he were waiting for her to say something. She smiled slightly and took her eyes away, and when she looked back, he was concentrating on something in front of him, below the sill of the window. She had the sense of wanting to record everything; it was what she always felt upon her arrival in a new city.
“Mama can’t wait to see you,” Sheri said. She nodded at Tyler. “Both of you.”
“We’re looking forward to it,” he said.
“How was the ride down? It’s supposed to be nice sleeping on a train.”
“I lost consciousness, and poor Lily was awake all night.”
“Well, anyway, you’re here and it’ll be fun,” said Sheri. “Don’t you worry about a thing.”
Tyler stopped, yawned, and stretched. The muscles of his arms were lean and veined and hard; Lily experienced a little thrill of realizing again how burly and solid he was. He pushed the cart forward, and they walked along with him. A group of Girl Scouts came running past them. Some of them held ice-cream cones.
“Millicent’s so excited,” Sheri said. Then, to Tyler: “No matter what you came here thinking.” She seemed to stop herself. “I mean, she’s not like you might expect.”
“What did you suppose I might expect?” he asked her.
Sheri pressed on. “She’s nervous about it, of course. But it’s mostly excitement. She spent all this week cleaning and polishing and dusting and rearranging furniture. Everything’s got to be perfect. She drove Buddy about out of his little mind this week. You wouldn’t believe it.”
“Buddy?” Tyler said.
Sheri turned to him. “That’s what he wants to be called. I keep calling him Daddy, of course. He doesn’t like that.”
They reached the car. Sheri opened the trunk and stepped back. Tyler started putting the bags in, arranging
them neatly, in rows, pushing on them to get them all in. She helped to close the trunk, then turned and leaned against it and regarded him, holding the big hat over her abdomen. “You’re not here to cause any trouble, right?” Her smile was playful, but there was a trace of something in her eyes.
“Hey,” he said. “I’m bringing my new wife to the only family I have left, strange as that family is. And I’m starting a new job, remember?”
“I guess we are pretty strange,” Sheri said. She put her arm over Lily’s shoulder, a confiding gesture. “But I’ve got my roomie back, right?”
They got into the car, Tyler insisting on getting in the back. It was very close and hot in the cramped space, and Sheri turned the air conditioner on high. They had to talk loud over the noise of it. Lily sat with eyes closed for a time, enjoying the cooling rush of air. They rode into the streets of the city, the most decayed parts of it—run-down shacks, sagging porches, and broken or boarded-up windows. It all looked abandoned. There were dirt lawns, and now and again a shady patch of grass under a single tree. Lily saw houses that at first glance appeared prosperous, but then something would undercut the impression: the hull of a washing machine in a side yard; tar paper nailed to the panel of a door.
“Hey, you guys—do you know the difference between a Republican woman and a Democratic one?” Tyler asked. “A Republican woman gives her heart to Bush.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Think about it,” Tyler said.
“Lily, do you get it?”
“Senator Hart,” Lily said. “The Democrat. Remember what happened with him and the girlfriend?”
There was a pause, and then Sheri broke into a high-pitched, trilling laugh with several lovely notes in it. “Damn, I think I get dumber as time goes on.”
“That’s all right,” Tyler said. “We don’t love you for your mind.”
“Good thing.” Sheri’s eyes were bright, and she stared ahead, still laughing.
Lily experienced a wave of affection for her. Tyler leaned forward and said, “A joke is like a live thing. Dissecting it kills it.”
“That one arrived dead,” Lily told him.
“I thought it was funny.”
They were waiting at a light. Down the street was a series of shops, fronting on a narrow patch of asphalt. Beyond this was a theater complex and a mall, a white-brick facade that looked like fortification.
“This could be anywhere, USA,” Tyler said.
The light changed, and Sheri put the car in gear. “So what’re you-all’s plans?”
“I’m going to work for your father. That’s all we know for sure right now.”
“No honeymoon?”
“We haven’t given much thought to anything,” said Tyler. “Except getting here.”
“Lily, are you gonna let me introduce you to the theater people, down here?”
“Sure.”
“I bet they’d put on an original play if you’d write one. I remember you were always writing.”
“It’s a pretty big if,” Lily said.
Tyler asked to stop at a store, so he could buy some shaving things and maybe something to take his mother. Sheri pulled into a small shopping mall and turned the engine off. He got out without saying anything, and made his way in. For a few moments, the two women sat silently.
“I had a feeling about you and Tyler,” Sheri said. “I swear.”
“I’m still dazed,” said Lily.
“So he told you that I tried to head it all off?”
Lily nodded slightly. “He said you told him I wasn’t interested.”
“If I did, I don’t remember it.”
“He’s apologized for the—the lapse in time.”
“It worries me,” Sheri said, “that he’s here.”
“Why?”
“It’s this situation with my mother. I mean—if you knew your mother left you when you were little because she was pregnant with another man’s baby, how would you feel about her?”
Lily shook her head. “He seems—curious, I guess. I thought they’d been in touch.”
Sheri rolled down her window, then opened her door and sat around with her feet outside the car. She brought a napkin out of her purse and wiped her neck with it, gingerly. Then she folded it and offered it to Lily. “I’m glad you’re here and everything and I’m happy it all worked out, but actually it would’ve been okay with me if he went his way and we went ours.”
“Have you spoken to him seriously about any of this?” Lily asked.
“Oh, yeah, right.”
“You wanted us to come down here, Sheri.”
“I wanted you to come down. I was thinking of splitting up with Nick, remember?”
Lily said nothing.
The other patted her own cheeks, then pulled the door toward her and leaned up to look at herself in the side-view mirror. “Well, I hope things work out better for you than they have for me. I’m already seeing someone else. Nick doesn’t know it, of course. I mean, it’s just platonic, you know.”
“You’re what?” In the reactive instant she asked the question, Lily realized that this was unwelcome information and that she did not want to talk about it.
“A little,” said Sheri, with a small quaver in her voice. “But I mean I’m—Nick and I are together. His father’s, like, disowned him. A fuck’n oil tycoon, and won’t have a thing to do with him. We’re living with Mama and Daddy because Nick lost his job and we ran out of money—” She halted, shook her head, appeared for a few seconds to be thinking of something else, faraway. “He’s selling cars at Daddy’s dealership, too, now. And I don’t have the slightest idea where it’s all gonna end up. It’s day to day—no kidding.”
Lily remembered the impression she’d had of the other young woman’s appetite for reporting all her indiscretions and troubles like a kind of ongoing serial or drama. She said, “I’m a little worried about coming in on everyone like this.”
“You’re not what worries me, honey. Believe me.”
“What worries you?” Lily said. “You think Tyler’s—what—come to get some kind of—I don’t understand.”
“Forget it. Mother’s excited about it, don’t get me wrong. And there’s plenty of room. The damn house has, like, nine bathrooms.”
Tyler had come from the mall, with a plastic bag. Glass clanked in it. He leaned into the passenger-side window. “Anybody want a Coke or something else cold to drink?”
“Not me,” Sheri said. Lily shook her head.
He got in and closed the door. “I assume Galatierre Ford isn’t far from here.”
“I could take you by it,” Sheri said.
“That’s all right,” said Tyler. “I bought a little music b—” He made a small gulping sound that cut the word off. Then he took a breath and repeated himself: “Music box.” He reached into the bag and brought it out and opened it. It gave forth a tinkling, unrecognizable music. “Oh, well,” he said. “Maybe I’ll get her something else when I have more time.”
“Are you nervous?” Sheri said.
“Not me.” He gave her a placid, smiling look.
Lily reached back and touched his knee. “I love you,” she said. “Mr. Man.”
He concentrated on putting the music box back in the bag, and she saw that his hands shook. She patted the knee, and faced front, not wanting him to know that she had seen it.
The road wound through farm fields—corn, soybeans, what looked like tobacco, and cotton. Beyond it all, the sky was a clear, pelagic blue. He brought a couple of bottles of RC out of the bag, and offered one to Sheri, and one to Lily.
“Aw, ain’t he sweet,” Sheri said.
He opened his own and drank most of it down in one gulp. “Where’s your father on the subject of last fall’s election? Is he happy with the result? I bet he votes Republican. Without ever having met him, I’m willing to bet he never even voted for Truman.”
“He’s not old enough to have voted for Truman. He was only—what—six years
old when Roosevelt died.”
“You have it figured out?”
“That’s right,” Sheri said with mock contentiousness. “I do, yes. You want to make something out of it?”
“You want to step outside?” Tyler asked.
“You first,” said Sheri. “I’ll speed up so you can get a nice flying start.”
“Oh, I’m a lover, not a f—” Again, there was the little gulp. And again, he took a breath and repeated himself: “Not a fighter.”
“You’re my lover,” Lily told him, only glancing back. Her heart ached for what he must be feeling.
The countryside grew uneven and wild—low hills, with stands of skinny pines, and expanses of empty brown pasture. The sun had burned the grass to a dry, flammable dust. They passed through a broken-down wooden gate, and Lily saw a row of fence posts going off to the vanishing point, into the woods, with strands of sagging barbed wire attached to them. The wire was a burned-red color, and it had left stains, like the scars of a whip, on the wooden posts. Beyond one field, under a clutch of heavy trees, was a faded yellow house with a veranda, a double porch. She watched it recede into the distance. The road was gravel now, and a column of blue dust rose behind the car.
“This used to be a plantation,” Sheri said.
They came around a slow bend, and the yellow house came into view again. It was not as imposing as it had seemed from a distance. Sheri pulled in front of it and parked next to a big station wagon, blaring on the horn. “Home,” she said.
Lily felt suddenly a little shaky herself. She opened her door; Tyler had come around the car. Her husband, standing there holding a bottle of cola, and the paper bag. He handed the bag to her. “This is from both of us—will you give it to her?”
She took it. Her nerves were jangling. Sheri’s mother stood out on the veranda—a small, thin-boned woman with chiseled, intelligent features. Dark-brown hair without a trace of gray framing a tan, lined face. She approached, and with an offhand sort of gracefulness extended her hand to Lily, smiling. “Welcome,” she said. “Welcome to Mississippi.” Her cheekbones were prominent, her eyes deep set, their color such a bottomless shade of green that you lost the black iris at the center. She wore a white blouse, jeans, and sandals. The blouse accentuated the bronze hue of her skin, her brown hair. She was quite beautiful.
Hello to the Cannibals Page 17
