We lay on our backs, heads propped on pillows. He had his hand on my stomach, but you never feel your stomach is flat enough and I didn’t want it any higher, because you never feel your tits are big enough, so I slid it down to my thigh, where it felt comfortable.
“I liked my dad,” he said, “despite the fact he never got his act together. He joked around, though a lot of the time what he found funny was at someone else’s expense. My mom took his failures hard.”
“I didn’t know any of that, at first, about your family, not when you first started coming around, anyway. My daddy would say, ‘An up-and-coming young man.’ Mother would say, ‘Such a nice young man with a nice future.’ I guess, come to think of it, they still say that—” Because he was who he’d always been.
“You have no idea, Ella,” he told me, leaning up on one elbow, “what it did for me, being welcome at your parents’ house; what being approved of by them meant. I suppose from the start, I was marrying your family as much as I was marrying Terrell. She must have sensed that. That must have been part of the trouble.”
“You wanted in and I wanted out.”
He traced my collarbone. “When I waded through that backyard swamp and knocked on that screen door with the rip in it big enough for a mosquito the size of a crawdad to crawl through, and that daughter of yours asked me, ‘Would you like a peanut butter sandwich, Uncle Rufus,’ I was ready to move in. I felt I’d come home.”
I kissed his nose, feeling a little response down below. I kissed it again. “I liked you back then, when you were a student.”
“I was trying to impress you.” He found my stomach again, and above and below, but just a hello, because his hands didn’t know me yet.
I rolled over and looked at him, at his suntanned face, his hazel eyes, his too-short graying dark hair. Having an attack of fear-of-loss, I asked, “Can we keep this?”
He hesitated. “I don’t know. I worry you’ll get home to Metairie and go back to your roses and that slick guy who takes you to the movies on Saturday. And this will seem—too far away, too complicated.”
“I won’t forget. Your name is Rufus, that’s Red to me and your mom.”
After a pause, he said, “You were talking earlier about the first time you did it, in a car—”
“Come on, hey. I was just trying to say that when you’ve had sex for so many years with somebody—and then when you’re with somebody that you, that matters—I was trying to say it gets awkward. The first time, you’re just glad to— do it.”
“Was that the first time for you, with Buddy?”
“I should think.” I laughed and shook my head at that ancient time. “He got me in high school. If I hadn’t run away when I did, Mother would have kicked me out. I know she thought I was preggers, but I wasn’t.”
“Terrell and I waited a long time, I guess you know, such a long time, till she got her ring. I thought it had to do with her needing to feel she’d held out for marriage. But then—” His voice faltered a bit, and he sat up against the white pillows. “It turned out I wasn’t the first.”
“She told you that?” I lay flat back, burrowing my head against his shoulder, amazed.
“It shouldn’t have mattered. I’d … been with a girl in high school myself. But it got under my skin. She called it a double standard. But it was that she made such a big deal out of waiting.”
How could I not know about this? Though what Terrell did in that regard, once she got on the university campus, was naturally not my business. Except she’d liked confiding. Way before Mr. Emu. “Oh, Red,” I said, “that had to do with Mother. Marrying from home in a proper formal church wedding, saving herself, all that.”
“I never pressed her.” He slipped a hand into my hair.
I couldn’t help it, knowledge stirred in my midsection. And I knew as sharply as if I’d been run through with a knife, that of course she had fucked someone else first, and of course it had been Buddy. Twisting upright, as if from a blade, I thought back to the way, every time I’d seen her or talked to her on the phone, she’d asked me, What do you hear from Buddy? Do you ever hear from Buddy? Do you still miss Buddy? And could hear again the way her voice would change, just that little barely noticeable bit. I shut my eyes and tried to hear her again. The first time she told me about Mr. Emu, her saying, “I never had what you had with Buddy.” But now I heard it as “I never had with Buddy what you had.” I heard her telling me without telling me. Her confession. How could it have been an accident: the rancher from Notrees his spitting image?
I tried to remember what Buddy used to say about her, back when we’d first started hanging out, when he’d been getting in my pants in the car, when he was driving me wild with finding out what my body was all about. “You’re a lot hotter than your sis,” he said. “You’ve got it all over her, El,” he said. I thought he meant, of course I thought he meant, that he was laying out the reason he’d stopped hanging around her and taken up with me: we made the seas part and lit the sky with fire. It never dawned on me, of course it didn’t, that he meant he’d been there first. But he had. And they did. And naturally she had to break it up, no way she could have so much as had a public beer with someone who had no future. Not at our mother’s house.
Pushing away Red’s hand, I jumped out of bed, hunting around on the floor for my panties. “Did you set me up for that? Waiting till after we’d done it?”
He stood also, not starting to dress. “What are you talking about? Ella, what did I say?”
“You know it was Buddy she screwed first. You know that.” Tears streaked my cheeks.
He took a step back; then, his face gone white, he reached for his shorts. “I don’t know that.”
I was shouting. “You think I don’t realize I’ve always been second choice to everyone? First to my parents, then to my randy dumb lying husband, now to you? You think I don’t understand that you only ever wanted me because I’m her sister, the one who knows about Mr. Emu and the airplane and the piano, and who she really was back then, and Buddy. You think I don’t know that as long as you’re screwing me, you’ve still got her?”
He reached for my shoulders. “Ella, listen to me.”
But instead we heard the sound of the boys’ car squealing into the driveway, and were barely at the coffeepot when they came, laden with packages, bursting through the door.
23
I came in from Red’s, my body still dazed from lovemaking, my heart still scored, sore, from our fight, to find Daddy and Birdie unloading sacks of groceries. My daughter’s eyes big as saucers, presumably at the unthrifty nature of her granddad. Daddy, flapping his shirttail and downing a full glass of water without ice, keeping up his swallowing, announced that they had passed the mail carrier in shorts and a pith helmet, looking like a heatstroke about to happen.
I knew this would allow him to embark on one of his favorite discourses: a complete history of the postal service beginning with the first adhesive stamp sold for prepayment of postage before the Civil War. “I’m going to set the record straight for this girlie, here,” he told me as I edged toward the door. “I bet your fine daughter did not know that the familiar slogan ‘Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night shall stay these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds’ did not originally refer to the postal service but to the mounted messengers of King Xerxes of Persia.”
She did not.
Shaky, feeling that I might jump out of my skin, I kissed them both and beat a retreat up the stairs. Climbing, I could hear him on the early horse-and-buggy days of Rural Free Delivery.
In the old room, I stretched out on the bed that had been mine a few light-years ago, my head facing north, my arms east and west. (I used to have to imagine myself in bed in this room to get a bearing on direction. And still sometimes felt that, wherever I was, the sun should be rising over my left shoulder, setting over my right.) It was a mistake and I knew it, to lie here, a pillow over my head, Mother’s monogram stit
ched above my nose, still stung to numbness by the idea of my sister with Buddy.
I didn’t want to mess up what had been so special—the oranges, Red’s arms in bed, the idea that we could truly be getting something started between us. But nonetheless and notwithstanding, I felt sick to my stomach. Wondering if Terrell might indeed have been happier if she’d been the one who’d run off with Buddy. Trying to picture her in that mega-fancy repo yacht he’d sent photos of, her sunshades on, hair streaked a lemon blond by the Gulf Coast sun, her arm draped around his bare shoulder, a big grin on her tanned face. Maybe waving at the camera: So long, bye-bye.
I could see, a quarter of a century ago, Mother’s flowered living room, see Daddy through the open doorway of his library. See Mother, trim and not much older than I was now, scoot down the hall to answer the door, calling out, “Why, come in, Rufus.” Leading him into the chintzy living room, her voice rising, “Terrell, dear, your young man is here—”
Could see him, the guy my mom had got all aflutter about, the one my daddy, the towering, bearded young professor, was rising to greet, hand outstretched. The lean law student in horn-rim glasses with the mop of curly dark hair, come to court their elder daughter.
What I saw now, pulled from memory like a forgotten snapshot, what I had not wanted to see then, so infatuated was I already with Buddy, was the two of them, standing close enough to touch, in the living room the moment before the doorbell rang: my sister and Buddy Marshall. Looking, the pair, like every school’s Homecoming Queen and King, him big, totally gorgeous, those blue eyes, that kind of girl-melting grin, her tall, with honey hair, that Texas tan, long legs in short pink shorts—gazing up at him.
Saw how he stepped back, glowering, when Red came in.
Saw how she shrugged and looked from him to Mother.
“Rufus,” Mother had said, “I’m sure you’ve met our other daughter, Ella. And her friend here—” She frowned at Buddy. “I’m sorry—you boys and your nicknames.”
“It’s Buddy, ma’am, and that’s my name.”
What I’d remembered, all I’d wanted to remember, was the way he’d come over to my side, the way the touch of his hand on my arm had sent goose bumps to my hairline.
I groaned and pressed my face into the musty pillow in its laundered case. I’d always been second choice to everyone. Each of them, the lot of them, thinking: Oh, yes, Ella. All we’ve got left is Ella.
Birdie knocked on the door. “Mom?”
She was in her baggy shorts and tank top, hair loose, face scrubbed. “Did you have a date with Uncle Rufus this morning?” she asked.
“Yes, I did. We had breakfast at a Mexican cafe and then I saw a wonderful room full of oranges.”
“Is that why you’re crying?”
“Am I?” I tested my wet face, finding evidence she was right. “That’s silly, isn’t it?”
“No, that’s what girls do. I and Felice have friends who do that. The ones who work at the Pink Mall? They have a date and then they cry a lot.” She hesitated. “Did you used to do that with my daddy?”
“I did,” I admitted, a more than fair statement. And that allowed me to locate a weak smile. Her wanting to think that Uncle Rufus didn’t have anything over her daddy. “What do boys do?” I asked her, trying to pull myself together. “After they’ve had a date?” And, truthfully, I did wonder what Red was doing over there, in that house of his, after everything we’d done and said, the good parts and the bad.
“They kick things, that’s what our friends say. They kick things with other guys, balls or something. Soccer players, they date all the time.”
This cheered me no small bit. Imagining Red giving a field-goal heft to the pillow left on the floor by his bed, to the rolled-up pair of socks he’d had on. Even, perhaps, angry, to the half-eaten orange left in the pottery bowl in the computer room. Bare foot smacking orange rind.
“Birdie, are you up there?” A man’s voice called to her up the stairs.
“Hello, Uncle Rufus,” my daughter blared back. “I and my mom will be down in a minute.”
I sat on the side of the bed and put on my sandals, then stood and peered into the dresser mirror. Did I still look as if I’d just come from his bed? Were my feelings all over my face?
“After you have a date with Karl, he always kids with me about that head cheerleader he made up,” Birdie said. “I think men want you to know that they aren’t taking your mom away from you, that they aren’t trouble. Like maybe Uncle Rufus is here to kid with me?”
“You’re good with pattern recognition,” I told my daughter, making a wide smile so she’d know this was some kind of grown-up joke. “That’ll come in handy.”
She hesitated. “Do you like Uncle Rufus better than Karl?”
“I guess I do.” I didn’t see any point in explaining all the gray areas involved in the adult man-woman thing. Anyway, it might be she saw things clearer than I did. “What do you think?”
“Karl isn’t a daddy,” she said, frowning with trying to say it right, “so he doesn’t know a lot of things that daddies know. That I bet even my daddy knew.”
How could I have caviled about who Buddy stuck it in and when? I was the one who got this daughter. For that, I had never taken his name in vain, or hardly ever, and felt ashamed of having done so in the deep hurt of my mind. “He did,” I told her, with surety and warmth. “Your daddy wasn’t much for settling down with anybody, he hadn’t seen that as being very helpful to his own daddy, but he did what he said he would do, and he knew the very best thing he ever did in his life was you.” For one who’d lied to most everyone in her time, this one stuck a bit in my throat. But who knew? Maybe it was true. Maybe it was.
“I guess I better go see Uncle Rufus,” Birdie said, looking happy at my answer. “So he’ll know I’m not mad at him because you had a date with him.”
¿Dónde están las naranjas? Où sont les oranges? Where are the oranges? Dear Gardener, Dear Gardener, help me out here. Floods, droughts, freezes, heat waves, fights between lovers, all those variables of temperature and moisture. How could you ever be sure your tree would bear fruit?
24
All of them were in the library when I came down, shod and brushed, Red and his boys, Daddy, Birdie. All except Mother, who, my daddy said, had gone to get her hair done. He’d taken her and would pick her up. “Salon matters are out of my bailiwick,” he said, meaning, no doubt, that his health letters were short on reports about the efficacy of a good cut and color.
Red held out his hand. “Did you get any lunch?” he asked. “I’m afraid we took too long looking up the options of my citrus growers.”
“We ate so much at Cisco’s—I wasn’t hungry anymore.” It felt more awkward even than I imagined, with the boys staring at us, the fight unsettled between us.
We’d stood in his kitchen, clothes barely back on, scarcely an hour ago, looking at the perk pot and one another as if at foreign objects. Then Red (easily it seemed to me), told his sons, “Ella came by to see my fancy orange display. But she stuck around long enough for us to have a fight.” To which they’d said, “Hi, Dad,” and “Hi, Aunt Ella,” looking at the walls, then, when we went about the business of getting our mugs, they seemed to relax. They spread out their considerable Yalie purchases for us to admire. Their general attitude conveying: Adults, you figure them out.
When Red walked me to my car, I had to admit that what he’d told them had worked well. At least it took their minds off the obvious conclusion they could come to looking at our kiss-smeared faces, our general disarray. That we’d just had sex. Although, I would have bet, at that moment they might have been bird-dogging around his room, seeing the sheets half on the floor, taking in the smell.
“Good for them to find out fights don’t mean the world ends,” he had said.
“Don’t they?” I burned half the remaining rubber on my tires taking my hurt feelings out of Pflugerville.
“Mom?” Birdie tugged on my tee, her face glowing,
“Uncle Rufus says he wants to buy me a cello so I can play like this—” She held up the Brahms Double Concerto for Violin and Cello in A minor. “But I told him he didn’t have to buy me a cello just because he had a date this morning with my mom.”
“Sheeesh,” Bailey said, looking skyward, scooting down in the chair until he all but sat on his shoulders, his body language asking: How come it had been his lot to be born into this family?
“Birdie—” Borden leaned forward, his elbows on his thighs, sitting the way his dad often did, his one-stripe polo tee tucked in, his brow furrowed with the effort to explain matters. “You don’t have to say everything you think.”
“It’s all right if you don’t do that, Borden,” Birdie came back at him, “because you’re going to Yale. But it’s all right if I do.”
The library was the one room in Mother’s lemon-yellow, leaf-green matched and decorated house that belonged to Daddy. His walnut desk was there, covered with volumes stuck with slips of paper. And stacks of pages of his History of a Historian in progress, where it had been since he retired from the University of Texas. As if he could be sure he’d last as long as it and he were still unfinished.
One wall had floor-to-ceiling books, most on the settlement of the Mediterranean Sea, since that was his specialty. But a lot of large gift volumes or sets as well—The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, Lives of the Queens of England, Dutch Settlement in the New World—because what else do you give a historian for a gift? (Except yellow-striped ties for Father’s Day.) The rug was well worn, American Indian, the two leather chairs where the boys sat, old and cracked, a deep persimmon. A framed copy of an early faded map of the Mediterranean hung behind his massive desk.
Red looked at me, and when he spoke his voice sounded raw. “Sometimes,” he said, “somebody wants to do something and they don’t get around to it in time. My boys and I talked it over, and we decided that Birdie’s Aunt Terrell would want some of the money she left us to be used to buy a musical instrument for somebody who really wants it.”
Ella in Bloom Page 15
