“Was it Ajax back then?” Candace asked.
“Nope, it was a pizzeria. Over there in the middle, where all the tables are, there was a salad bar.”
“It was some of the saltiest pizza you ever tasted,” Jennifer said. “When your dad and I came in here, the first thing we asked for was a pitcher of water.”
“That we always got refilled two or three times.”
“We ordered a large combo, even though your dad used to hate mushrooms. He’d pick them off his half and dump them on mine.”
“I’d eat a few from time to time. What I really wanted was the Hawaiian pizza, but the mere thought of it made your mother gag.”
Candace said, “What’s on that?”
“Ham and pineapple,” Jennifer told her, shuddering.
Both girls groaned.
“Did you eat here a lot?” Trish asked.
“Whenever we could afford it.”
“How often was that?”
Jennifer laughed. “Not very.”
They brought our plates—I got the catfish with sweet potato casserole, corn bread and fried okra—and Jennifer and I each ordered another drink. If I had to guess, I’d say we sat in that booth for pretty close to two hours.
It was what I’ve come to think of as our throwback day. We were as we’d been for countless thousands of meals—a family of four, parked around a table and making small talk. We were, to take the notion even further, parked around a table in the town where everything had started, where I’d helped a girl about the age of my daughters find details of a massacre, where everyone then stood and watched helplessly while a different kind of massacre occurred. If Evans Harrington hadn’t told his class about those murders in Carrollton, their mother and I might never have met. And if that deer hadn’t crashed through the glass and gotten shot, she wouldn’t have asked me to walk her home. One thing, as I saw it that day, led to another.
The fact that I’d been cautioning students against taking a purely event-based approach to history, with its easy causal lines, didn’t come to me until later. There at Ajax Diner, surrounded by the three people who’d meant the most to me for most of my life, it all made perfect sense.
We spent the night at a local B and B. I happened to know that in the late nineteenth century, this was Oxford’s top brothel and owned by a notorious woman reputed to be quite handy with a straight razor. It still sported whorehouse décor: big heavy red drapes, a bidet in the bathroom, an enormous canopied four-poster that could’ve withstood the most rambunctious activity, if anybody put it to the test, but we didn’t. By the time I got out of the shower, Jennifer was fast asleep, a mask over her eyes and orange stopples in her ears.
THE FIRST TIME Maggie and I make love, it’s raining. The limbs of the pecan trees in the backyard dip and sway, dropping brown hulls, and thunder shakes the walls and floor. It’s quite the storm.
By the time we climb the stairs and peel our clothes off, it’s after six on Wednesday and we’ve had a lot to drink, five or six glasses of wine for her and five or six shots of that awful VO for me. Later, she’ll joke that we got to where we were because I was full of Canadian courage.
Where we are is a rickety bed she rented with the rest of her furniture, in an otherwise empty room whose green wallpaper is water stained. There’s not even a bedside table. Her alarm clock stands on the floor alongside several stacks of books and magazines. I see a copy of Les Misérables down there and a few issues of the New Republic.
The bed smells like her, and not just because she’s in it. The scent of her perfume lingers in a room long after she’s left it, acting as her proxy. You can smell her in the hallways and the teachers’ lounge, too. For days I’ve been feeling like she’s worked herself inside me. I was drunk before I ever touched that VO.
For a long time nothing happens except I hold her and she presses her face against me. “You’re smooth here,” she says, running her hand over my sternum. “Like a boy.”
It’s true. I don’t have much body hair, and it’s soft, what little there is. In high school, when it started growing on the other guys’ chests, I felt self-conscious, but I haven’t thought about it in years. I never go swimming, and Loring’s too small for a health club, so there’s no occasion to get undressed in front of anybody who’s seeing me naked for the first time.
“You’re scared, aren’t you?” she says.
“Yeah.”
“You haven’t done this before.”
It’s a statement, not a question, and that spares me the need to answer. I don’t have to ask a question, either, but I do. “Have you?”
“Oh, I’m afraid I’ve done far too much of it.”
The crown of her head is touching my chin. I stroke her hair. “For your own good?”
“No.” She stifles what feels like a laugh. “For the good of mankind, obviously.”
“So why’d you do it?”
This is one of those times when she takes a while to answer. “Well, I was looking for something.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. I just know I never found it. Every time I tried, I promised myself it would be the last.”
“Hard to find it if you don’t know what it is.”
“You’re absolutely right.”
I know I should stop this line of inquiry. That, I feel sure, would be the smart thing to do. But being smart isn’t where I am. I’ve thrown intelligence out the window and it’s out there on the ground, getting soaked with the pecans. “Your husband wasn’t it?”
Her hand stops moving. “My husband was a wonderful man. I’d even say he was a great man, though I didn’t really understand that until he died. He influenced a lot of people, some of whom never even met him. A memorial service was held in Duke Chapel, and you wouldn’t believe how many people attended. Former students came from across the country. One young man, some kind of official in the Indian government, flew all the way from New Delhi. And numerous old colleagues from CNN. Ted Turner showed up, with three or four bodyguards.”
“What about Jane?”
“No, they’d already divorced.” Once more her hand is moving. It slides down my chest, over my stomach, a distance you could measure in inches, so why does this motion last forever? “The young man from New Delhi came over, took my hand and said that if you added up all the hours he’d spent in my husband’s office, listening to Anthony talk about how he might influence the lives of poor people back in India, he bet it was several weeks, if not months. He had tears in his eyes when he told me this, and of course he expected me to be moved, and I was. But I couldn’t help thinking what all those hours added up to for me. Just a lot of time alone.”
“Was that the main problem in your marriage?”
“I think the main problem in my marriage was me. Or at least my expectations.”
“They were too high?”
“No, they were stratospheric. I wanted what you could get from being married to a man with that kind of drive and commitment, but I also wanted what you couldn’t. So from time to time I looked elsewhere.”
“I guess I’m the anti-Anthony then. Because I’m just a guy who gets up in the morning hoping to make it through the day.”
She climbs on top of me, locks her hands behind her head and closes her eyes. “Well, it looks like you’ve made it through this one,” she says. “The question is, will either of us survive the evening.”
• • •
The next morning, at breakfast, I’m so solicitous that Jennifer acts annoyed. “More oatmeal?” I ask while she’s sipping her tea. A book lies open on the table, one of those little thin ones the poetry presses publish, and she’s staring at it so intently she can’t hear me. So I repeat my question. “Want any more oatmeal?”
She looks up sharply. “What?”
I point at her bowl. “More oatmeal. I’d be happy to make some.”
“Why would I want more oatmeal? Have you ever known me to want more?”
The truth is that I
’ve never noticed how much oatmeal she eats at breakfast, because for a long time now I haven’t noticed her. She eats, I eat, we rinse our dishes and leave, sometimes without bothering to say goodbye. “Just thought I’d ask,” I tell her.
“Well, now you know.” She dips her head and goes back to her book.
In the shower I lather up, remembering how Maggie’s face looked last night with her eyes wide open, the tight lines showing at the corners of her mouth. She remained completely silent the whole time, speaking only with her body. Towards the end she moved harder than I knew a woman could, as though her own rhythm was all that mattered. She rocked backwards, grabbing a fistful of her own hair in each hand, pulling at it like she meant to tear it out in clumps.
Afterwards, as we lay there listening to the rain, she said, “No one has ever made me feel like that except the man I married. I just thought you should know.”
I was reminded, in that instant, of Spiro T. Agnew, who told us, shortly before being indicted: I try to be credible. I want to be believed. I couldn’t help it. I burst out laughing.
She was lying on her back beside me, her hand holding mine. She let go and said sharply, “Why are you laughing at me?” Her eyes flashed, warning me that she wasn’t playing around. I felt sure I’d seen the same look on her face all those years ago, as I lay breathless on the ground after she sent me flying off that porch. She hadn’t been playing then, either.
“I’m not laughing at you,” I said. “I’m laughing at myself.”
“I didn’t see you do anything funny.”
“It’s just so strange for somebody, after all this time, to praise my lovemaking ability.”
“I’m not just somebody.”
“You know what I mean.”
“No, I don’t. And I wasn’t praising your ability. That’s not what I said.”
I understood right then what made her so different. It wasn’t the scent of her perfume, and it wasn’t that beautiful black hair, which, considering her age, must come in a bottle now. It wasn’t her wealth or worldliness, nor the thrill of a shared distant past. It wasn’t even how she made love, though nobody had ever made love like that to me. It was her hunger to have things a certain way. She knew how to want. And at the moment, that didn’t scare me. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Could we back up?”
“Back up to where? To where we were before you climbed into my bed?”
She wasn’t touching me anymore, but even without direct contact I could feel the tension in her body. She’d gone rigid. “No,” I said, “just back to where we were when you were telling me how I made you feel. Could you say that again, and let me start over?”
I didn’t know whether she’d tell me to get my ass out of her house or punch me in the mouth. The expression on her face never changed, and her body remained stiff. “No one … has ever made me feel like that … except the man I married. I just thought … you should know.”
“And I’ve never made anybody else feel like that,” I said. “Not even the woman I married.”
“How can you be sure?”
“I just am.”
Finally, her face softened. “It is,” she said, “fairly easy to tell.”
I park in the teachers’ lot next to the Mercedes, get out and go inside. Driving over, I’ve convinced myself that what happened last night will not be repeated, that Maggie’s curiosity has now been satisfied. After all, she said she’d had similar experiences before. Her comment about how I’d made her feel was probably just out of kindness. Maybe she says it every time.
I tell myself that it really would be okay, that in fact it might be better. Jennifer and I have a history, and it lives in separate rooms in the same dorm at Ole Miss. The thought of getting caught, of having to face my wife and daughters after they’ve found out, is terrifying. You can’t hide an affair for long in a town like Loring. I’ve never had one, but there are just some things you know.
You know, for instance, that a few years ago, an English teacher got caught having sex with one of her students in a pickup parked down close to the Sunflower River. You know that the kid’s father wasted no time calling Ramsey Coleman and promising to kill the teacher if he didn’t run her off, and Ramsey was only too happy to oblige. She got a job over in Arkansas, in another little town, and it wasn’t a year before she had to leave there, too.
You know about other, similar scandals: Linwood Norris, head salesman at the John Deere dealership, a member of the Chamber of Commerce and the father of three boys between the ages of eight and thirteen, slept with one of the checkers out at Wal-Mart and then became obsessed, following her home from work, tailing her around town, calling her at all hours of the day and night, even though she was engaged and told him that what happened between them was just a big mistake. Finally, she got a restraining order against him, and Linwood’s wife took the boys to her parents’ place in Jackson.
You know how these things go. Doesn’t everybody?
Still, I decide to stop by her room before the bell rings. That just seems like the decent thing. If she wants to smile, as I believe she will, and tell me that while it was really wonderful, it’s not something we’ll be able to do again, I’d rather hear it than wait till the end of the day.
She’s not there. I hang around near the door until two minutes before eight, nodding at the students as they file past, a couple of them giving me funny looks, wondering what I’m doing here. When I finally give up and head for my own room, at the far end of the west wing, I see her: like me, she’s been standing outside the door, this small, trim woman in the same white slacks and purple blouse she wore the first day of school. She looks anxious, her hands working nervously as they hang by her sides. She has no intention of leaving. The bell rings, but she doesn’t move.
She watches while I walk towards her. When I’m four or five feet away, she says, “Yes?”
I don’t know how I know this, but I do: yes with a question mark after it doesn’t mean yes and it doesn’t mean no. It’s not a statement, but neither is it a question. What it is is an opening, a space you can either fill in or choose not to.
I don’t look over my shoulder to see if anybody’s in the hallway behind me, and I don’t glance up to check the angle of the nearest security camera, which allows Ramsey to keep an eye out for drug deals, vandalism and knife fights. What I do is eliminate the distance between us just as fast as I can.
MY FATHER NEVER LIKED THE FALL. A lot of farmers feel the same way, and even though he hadn’t been one for many years, to some extent he still behaved as if he were, watching the Weather Channel like a suspense movie, tracking October cold fronts as they swooped down off the Great Plains bringing rain and, sometimes, ruination.
As much as he disliked that particular season, my mother always loved it. She never understood a thing about football but enjoyed going to the games, back when I played in high school, and I’d heard her go on and on about the wonderful aroma of burning leaves mixed with the odor of lint from the cotton gins. She even professed to like the smell of defoliant. And while most people were annoyed if they got caught behind a four-row picker on a narrow country road, creeping along at ten miles an hour, it never bothered her. Fall is the busiest time of year in the Delta, and she loved all the activity.
She hadn’t often been outside in the last couple of years and not once since coming home from the rehab center back in July. But their van was equipped with a lift, and though I didn’t find out about it for a couple months, sometime around the middle of October Dad began taking her out for a ride every few days.
He kept quiet because he knew if he told Jennifer or me, we’d insist he first check with her doctor, who almost certainly would have forbidden it. Sometimes her head lolled forward, sometimes off to the side. If they’d had a wreck, I imagine her body would’ve behaved about like a rag doll’s. But by then that wasn’t the worst possibility Dad was facing.
The first time they left the house, it was around ten in the morning. I’d have
been at school for two hours, and Jennifer would just have left to drive the twenty-eight miles to Delta State. The van—a twenty-year-old Ford Econoline that he’d repainted fire-engine red a few years ago because my mother loved that color—was the only one of its kind in town. We couldn’t have mistaken him for anybody else.
That first day he drove out towards the old place. There would’ve been a few pickers on the road, a couple of trucks moving the pallet modules that have replaced cotton trailers, a live-haul tanker headed for the Southern Prime processing plant. I doubt that anybody waved, like everybody used to. There weren’t that many folks left who even knew him.
All along, he acted as tour guide, slowing from time to time, calling attention to points of significance. Where Parker Sturdi-vant’s house used to stand, a mile or so from town—now in the middle of a catfish pond. Another couple of miles down the road, the overgrown landing strip where military planes took off back in the ’60s, making the house shudder. The Fairway Baptist Church, a little rundown now but still holding services just as it has every Sunday for going on eighty-five years. Not too far beyond that, the remains of the old Fairway Crossroads gin.
Finally, inevitably, they reached sixteenth-section land and stopped across the road from the place where I grew up. As I said earlier, the house itself burned down many years ago, so there wasn’t much to see besides a couple of concrete blocks standing in the tall grass near the edge of the road, a few pieces of rusty tin siding, several rotten two-by-fours and a good bit of broken glass. Otherwise, nobody driving by would’ve known that a home ever stood there. But he knew and, in some sense, he believed, so did she.
She lifted her head and was gazing out the window. That high-pitched keening began, and while her doctor had maintained that the tune was mostly in my father’s imagination, that it was highly unlikely she could retain so many sounds in melodic succession, he believed otherwise and supplied the lyrics for her, singing along in his husky voice:
Safe from the Neighbors Page 10
