The Courts of Love

by Ellen Gilchrist

  “Hello, Mrs. Watson,” she said. “We’re mighty glad you came to have dinner with us. I’m making dinner. Come in the kitchen and watch me cook.” I followed her into the kitchen. Suzanne and Davis were drinking wine but Livingston appeared to be sober and not under the influence of anything worse than the music that was playing. Some plaintive American Indian chant, something played on a flute.

  “I hope you like Indian curry?” Livingston said. “That’s what I’m cooking. If you hate it, I’ll make you some soup and a salad.”

  “Curry’s fine. I’m fond of curry. Where did you learn to cook it?”

  “In New York City. I lived in Manhattan last year with a girl from Cincinnati. Her dad has an apartment there and he let us have it for a year. We lived a block from Jackie Onassis. We were there when she died. Anyway, I learned to cook by running out of money and asking questions.”

  “What did you do when you were there?”

  “Nothing. Hanging out. Talking to people. Going to museums. Seeing plays.” She poured boiled rice into a bowl. It steamed beautifully. She put the bowl on a tray. “We’re almost ready to eat,” she said. “Did someone get you a glass of wine?” Davis was holding one out to me and I took it although I almost never drink. Davis and Suzanne were standing in the doorway to the dining room. The night was Livingston’s. We were letting her have it.

  “I stopped being a dope addict,” she said. She was grinning now and I could see all four of her grandparents in that face. This is the reason to stay in Harrisburg. To watch the generations form. To see what happens next to people I have been watching all my life. Here was Livingston, a girl I had completely written off, cooking Indian food and smiling huge smiles that made her absolutely pretty. She poured the curry into a second bowl, added it to the tray with the rice, and led the way into the dining room.

  We had a feast. I was feeling so guilty about the bad report I had made to Suzanne over Livingston that I drank too much. At least four glasses of wine. I must have been on the fifth when my old boyfriend, Braswell Carter, knocked on the door and Suzanne let him in. He is the best lover that has ever lived, in all probability. Three other women in Harrisburg will attest to that. Georgia Blake, who dated him after I broke up with him our senior year. Lucy Morrow, who married him the year after that. And Tera Thompson, who drank with him for five years. In between them I was coming and going in and out of his bed. I slept with him on and off until I was forty-five. I had written him off also. After the tenth rehabilitation program failed and after he threw a gin bottle through my bedroom window one Friday night when I wouldn’t answer the phone or let him in. I called the cops that night and since then we have only nodded when we met.

  “The best.” That’s what all four of us say. “The best in the world, in all probability.” I have talked to them about it, here and there across the years. We don’t know why he is the best. It’s not his physical beauty It’s something else, some rhythm, some deep humanity, some tenderness, some keen desire or drive or timing. Anyway, you don’t forget it.

  “Hello, everyone,” he said. “Hello, Annie. I’ve been missing you.”

  “How have you been?” I asked, wondering if he was drinking. This is the main question you ask when you see Bras. Is he drunk? Is he drinking? Will he throw something at me?

  “It’s snowing outside,” he said. “Did you all know it’s snowing?”

  That was the beginning of the night. He was not drinking, having just come back from dry-out program number eleven. The snow piled up. The snow covered the trees and the cars and the roads and the hills and the streetlights. The snow was magical and pure. We all went outside and caught it in our hands and giggled and ate flan for dessert and drank black coffee. Bras and I held hands on the sofa. Someone called. In a few minutes a four-wheel-drive vehicle came sliding into the yard and a young man who coaches the high school football team was there for Livingston and we turned off the lights and watched the fire and listened to Whitney Houston and Carly Simon and something else.

  “Well, you can’t go home now,” Suzanne said at last. “No one should drive in this snow. There are four bedrooms empty. Everyone take your pick. Davis and I are in the new suite.”

  “There are plenty of blankets in all the rooms,” Livingston said to me. “Suzanne’s a bedding freak.”

  Suzanne left the room and returned carrying robes and slippers and handed them to me. I was drinking brandy but I was still the one studying anthropology. So here we are back where we started, I decided. A snowy night in Harrisburg, Illinois. Nothing to do. An empty house the adults have abandoned. We are getting to use the beds and we will use them. I had a memory of a night at Dixie Lee Carouthers’s when her mother was out of town and six of us were necking together on her mother’s bed. Suzanne had been at that party. Come to think of it she might have been one of the ones on the bed. All the lights had been out that night and afterward I was so guilt stricken I had erased the memory.

  “Suzanne,” I said. “Do you remember one time when Dixie Carouthers’s mother was gone and we had a party there after a football game? Were you at that party?”

  “I thought that party up, honey,” she said to me. “It was the first blanket party in Harrisburg. Then we went inside.”

  “That’s right, I remember now. I was carrying a blanket on my bike all the way down Elm Street. I was feeling like a criminal with that blanket.”

  “Well, we aren’t criminals now,” she said and handed me the robes. “We are grown people and can have all the blankets we want.”

  Livingston started laughing at that and Bras slipped his hand around my waist and started caressing my ribs as though not a day had passed since the last time I told him I wouldn’t see him anymore.

  Davis banked the fire. Someone turned off the lights. Bras and I found a room upstairs and opened the heat vents and got into bed with our clothes on and started kissing. We kissed and kissed and kissed. The rest is private.

  We all had breakfast watching the still falling snow and acted like normal people and helped Suzanne pick up all the glasses from the night before. Bras drove me home in his truck and stayed a couple of days until the snow melted.

  So what was the problem? you might well ask. There should be some happy endings here. Not the same old unhappy patterns. Not snow turning into rain, as it says in the country-western song. Bras going back to drinking. Livingston continuing her work of breaking up her father’s marriage. Davis always getting rid of his crazy women before they can get rid of him. Prophecies and patterns. There should be a happy ending here. Not a dark and empty dream house with the roses dead as doornails and the people in separate apartments talking to their lawyers. That’s how it ended up. Davis got tired of the parties and Suzanne packed up and moved back to Chicago. Livingston moved in with the football coach for a while, then disappeared and hasn’t been heard from since. I guess she went back to New York. Bras went back to drinking. He was good for three weeks this time. It was a nice three weeks and worth the two rounds of antibiotics I had to take to cure cystitis.

  It makes me sad to pass that empty house when I walk the cocker spaniels. I refuse to look at it. I look up into the trees. I see squirrels and birds and visions. I see the dark architecture of the winter. I see the buds of spring. I see the lush, hot foliage of summer. Our oxygen factories. Our true and faithful lovers. I think about calling Davis and seeing how he’s doing but I never do it. I’ve run the money up to six hundred and fifty thousand as of last week. I have the degree in anthropology on my wall. I’ll be in France before too long. I’ll be diving down into the cold blue waters of the Mediterranean Sea. I’ll be breathing oxygen from a tank. I will have taken the stuff the leaves give us out of their love, and contained it in a tank and carried it down beneath the water to feed my blood while I swim past the French guards and along the passageway and when I surface I will see the hundreds of hands painted by their owners on the walls. I don’t believe the theory of ritual mutilation. They didn’t cut
their fingers off on purpose. They lost them to cold or bears or spiders or snakes. Then they went into the cave and painted them to get the lost parts back. I know what people want. They want to be whole. Perhaps we were whole that night we all spent together in the snow. Like a family ought to be, but who can bear that burden, that Procrustean bed? Who can bear to fight off all those other needs, neuroses, and obsessions? Not me. Not Anne Watson, age fifty-one and on her way to France.

  Fort Smith

  The small bear woke in his nest of oak leaves and rolled over onto his back to attend the sky. The great ball of fire burned down between the leaves, warming his stomach and his snout. He sniffed the air, searching for food. He had not eaten anything of value in two days. Since the day when the large bear ran him off, cuffing him over and over with his paws until finally the small bear gave up crying to his mother for help and loped off into the strange woods. Which became stranger the longer he traveled. The place where he was now was a long wooded hill that ran down to a creek, then to a long white line that smelled gritty and strange, a smell that made the small bear grind his teeth and swallow. He kicked his feet up into the air, he closed his eyes and concentrated on finding food. A smell of something fine and new came to him, distant and alluring, and he rolled over onto his feet and followed it down the hill and across the creek and found the source of it beside the water. A crackly, ugly exterior he had trouble swallowing and then, a lovely salty taste. It was the small bear’s first potato chip. An unopened sixty-nine-cent bag of chips a lady on a diet had flung from the window of a GMC Jimmy on her way home from a camping trip. That’s it, she had decided. Out of sight, out of mind. A minute on the lips, forever on the hips.

  The bear finished the bag and the chips and stood up to look around for more. On the white line huge animals went by at such a speed it seemed there was nothing to fear from them. Their smell was very bad, however, and he climbed back down into the creek to think it over. Mixed with the bad smell were other smells, good things to eat, fine new things to eat. He would wait until dark, then travel along the line to trace the smells. He crouched beside the water. He drank of it. He waited.

  Minette had married Dell one May. The next May she had graduated high school. In between she had DuVal. Then she had two abortions. Then she got smart. Now she was a checkout girl in the Wal-Mart and her mother took care of DuVal and Dell was still good to her but he was depressed. He was working at the chicken-plucking plant and he hated the work. He had never intended to marry Minette and have DuVal and be stuck in a job, but here he was and the only relief he got was when he was drunk. He only got drunk on the weekends. He never touched a drop from Monday to Friday afternoon.

  “There’s a bear loose in town,” he told Minette when they met by the garage after work. They had come driving up within a minute of each other. Minette hadn’t even had time to take off her apron or go and get DuVal.

  “One comes in every spring,” Minette told him back. “Don’t you remember that black bear we had last spring and they treed him by the bakery. It was on TV. You didn’t see it?”

  “Of course I saw it. Come here to me. What’s that on the front of your dress.” Dell moved in on her and she almost gave in and let him make her laugh. Then at the last minute she fought it off. “I got to go get DuVal. Momma said if I was late one more time she’d stop taking him. She’s been down in the back. He’s driving her crazy.”

  “He’s a crazy little boy. Got a crazy momma.” Dell pressed her against the hood of the Chevrolet. He nuzzled her with his chin.

  “You need a shave, Dell. Go take a shower and get the chicken feathers off of you. I’ll be right back. I’ll fry you a chicken if you’ll get it out of the freezer while I’m gone.” She pushed him away and walked out past the car to the Jeep and got into it and drove off to get DuVal.

  The small bear was getting very unhappy. There was food everywhere but he couldn’t find it. When he found it the bark wouldn’t come off. He had broken a claw trying to break open one of the shiny containers with the food inside that sat beside the clearings. He had found some food but no more of the fine, salty things he had found beside the creek. Deep in his brain a signal kept going off calling for more of that ambrosia. He loped along behind the line of trees he had found that morning. It seemed a very long time since he had been playing with his mother and his brothers. It seemed as if he were on a search that might never end. Go on, his brain told him. You can find it if you look.

  DuVal was packed and ready and standing on the porch. He had his things in his little backpack and he was holding a package of Lay’s potato chips his grandmother had bought on sale at the IGA. They had eaten part of them in the swing. The rest were still in the sack, secured by a long green and red clip his grandmother had attached to it. “Don’t eat any more of those chips until after dinner,” she had said. “I’m lying on this sofa resting my neck. You wait on the porch if you like, but don’t go down them steps.”

  Minette drove up waving and DuVal ran down the steps and got in. He was very coordinated for a three-year-old. One good thing about Dell, Minette was always saying. He takes DuVal off to play ball. “Got you some chips,” she said, leaning over to give him a hug. She fastened his seat belt. “Sit down then. Let’s go home and cook some dinner for your daddy. Momma,” she called out. “We’re going.”

  She waited a minute, until her mother came to the door and waved. “She’s all right,” Minette said to DuVal. “She always thinks there’s something wrong with her. It’s just her way.”

  Minette did a U-turn on the street in front of her mother’s house and drove fifty miles an hour down the side road and over to the housing development where their blue house stood on its acre and a half of ground. Dell had inherited it from his aunt. Someday that house and land would be worth some money, they were always saying to each other. If we just keep the taxes paid and hold on and wait, this house will put us on easy street. It was true. Fort Smith was growing so fast no one could keep up with it. Every year the outskirts of town grew nearer to the development, which had been way out in the country when Dell’s aunt had spent her salary as a nurse to buy the blue house. Some people in the family said she never married because she had seen too much death. Others said it was because she was ugly. Dell’s mother said she didn’t like men. Anyway, out of all her nieces and nephews she had picked Dell to get to have the house. Of course he was the only one who was a father when the aunt died. Maybe it had been because of DuVal. Now they had the house and except for having to keep all that land cut in the summer it was a nice little nest. The taxes on it were three hundred dollars a year but they could pay it. DuVal loved the big yard with its trees. Practically the only thing he talked about when he learned to talk was about trees and birds and squirrels.

  While Minette was frying chicken, DuVal walked out the back door and began to play around in the cleared place where they kept his toy trucks and his wagon and the tricycle he never rode because he was too small to ride it but Dell had bought it anyway one night when he was about half drunk. He couldn’t wait to have a child who could ride a bike and he had gone on and bought this tricycle that only a four- or five-year-old could even reach the pedals.

  The small bear lay in the curve of the cherry tree. There were small bitter berries on the tree and he had eaten several pawfuls of them, then chased the taste away with a pawful of grass. He lay back against the smooth bark. There were other fruit trees in the area and something about the place reminded him of better times. His stomach was small and flat again. Tonight he must try again to batter the bark of the shiny containers. Now he would rest in the heat of the late afternoon. Time had no meaning for the small bear. There was only heat and cold and smell, only pain where the big bear had scratched him on the shoulder and the smooth curve of the tree limb and the hot white ball in the sky. He lay back and closed his eyes, and slowly at first, and then more surely, he barely sensed and then smelled the potato chips. He sat up and reveled in it.

 
DuVal was taking the potato chips out of his pocket and putting them along the edge of the road he had built for his tractors. He lined them up. Every piece that was left in his pocket.

  “Dell, bring the baby on in here and get him cleaned up,” Minette called out. “Go on. I read in the paper that fathers never spend more than thirty minutes a day with their children. That’s why so many of them go bad.”

  Dell got up from the television set and walked out the back door and scooped up DuVal and rode him on his back. “Your momma is frying a chicken, son. Proving once again that wonders never cease.”

  The bear sat for a long time smelling the fine, rare smell. It was mixed with other smells now, each one finer and rarer than the last. He shook his head and stood up on his hind paws and scratched at the tree. Then he began to move in the direction of the feast. The last rays of the sun moved down between the leaves. He squinted his eyes against the light and followed the smell.

  A little brackish creek ran behind Minette and Dell Tucker’s place. Dell had built a stile over the backyard fence so DuVal could climb it and think he was going somewhere. That had proved to be a mistake as Minette couldn’t turn her back on DuVal without him starting climbing. In the end they had to put a little gate on the top and put a lock on the gate. “It makes the yard look like a prison,” Minette said, when all the work and the additions were done. “I don’t know why we started this in the first place.”

  “Because he needs to think he’s going somewhere,” Dell said. “When I was little we went anywhere we wanted to. We weren’t all walled in all the time like he is. I was dreaming the other night about him trying to get out of the yard. That’s why I built it.”

  “You are the craziest man I could have married,” Minette said. “That’s why I married you.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Dell answered. “We’ll see about that. I’ll show you crazy.” And he tackled her and laid her down on the sofa and started pretending to tickle her. “If I get knocked up I’m getting an abortion,” she told him. “You just be prepared for that.”