Carolina Moon (6 page)

“He sure doesn’t look so benevolent to me.” Alicia kept glancing back at Oscar like she expected him to jump out and yell “Boo!” at any minute. Alicia has a pretty smile when it surfaces, timid and sweet, and Quee can only imagine that a man as awful as Jones Jameson must get some sexual kick from such a look. A sweet, smart woman reduced to ninety pounds of frayed nerve, a woman so jumpy that she won’t even make eye contact with photographs if she can help it.

“Oh, honey, Oscar isn’t bad at all.” Quee started to say that compared to what’s leaking into Alicia’s own house from her own oozing
husband, Oscar could be put up for sainthood. She started to say that Alicia should watch that movie where Farrah Fawcett burns up her husband’s bed with him in it, but instead she told the story of Oscar as it had come to her, how Oscar was an immigrant, more or less, seeing as how he had no family in the area. Oscar loved the warm Southern weather, and he liked to stretch out like a cat in the sun and feel the heat on his face; he liked the squiggly red pictures that the bright sun etched into his closed eyelids. But most of all, Oscar loved a woman by the name of Emma, who had taken a neighborly interest in his welfare. He sensed a sadness in her, a loss they both knew. He loved the way she smelled like the pear preserves she was famous for making. He loved the way her hands moved gracefully over the banister of his porchrail. He loved her dark, thick hair that hung down her back like a young girl, even though she was a grown-up woman with a husband.

“Yes, poor, poor Oscar,” Quee had said, surprised to see the solemn, totally believing look on Alicia’s face. “He lived for the love he could never have, sustained on the crumbs she tossed his way, a loaf of bread, pear preserves, a muffler knitted at Christmas, the time they . . . Oh never mind,” she said. “You don’t care about Oscar.”

“But I do,” Alicia said. “I was wrong.” And then she realized the absurdity of her affirmation, this faith and acceptance, sympathy and hope, for something created out of thin air.

“It’s very easy to be wrong about a person’s life,” Quee whispered, wishing she could shake some sense into the girl so that she’d take her baby and get the hell out of her marriage. That seems like ages ago even though it was just last week.

NOW QUEE STANDS
in the doorway and watches Alicia pacing and twisting the phone cord. “He said he was going to Raleigh,” she says,
and then is quiet, shakes her head as if the person on the other end can see her responding. “I have no idea, Officer. He said it was a radio reunion or something, that’s all.” She leans forward and picks up one of Taylor’s little cars, runs it along the edge of the sink. “A gold Audi 5000. Yes.” She pauses and her face turns red. “His vanity plate says IM
2
SEXY. Yes, yes.” She hangs up the phone and feels her way into one of the kitchen chairs.

“They might think that means he’s one of those bisexuals,” Quee whispers and pats her on the shoulder. “Or they just think he’s a jerk.”

“Yeah.”

“But that doesn’t make
you
a jerk,” Quee says. “There is no such thing as a jerk by marriage. You are not going to wake up one day and be like him. There is nothing in this world to stop you from walking out and starting over.”

“It’s that easy?”

“That easy.” The bell rings down the hall, and Quee simply closes the kitchen door. “That’s what Denny did. She’ll be here any minute now.”

“I thought you said Denny had a breakdown.”

“I did, but it was just a little one.” Quee takes Alicia’s hands into her own and slaps them, massages, as if she’s reviving some small animal. “I mean don’t we all have little breakdowns all the time? It’s just some people’s are more noticeable than others.”

“You think?”

“Damn right. Don’t ever let anybody take away your right to have a little breakdown. Hell, foam at the mouth, check in somewhere. You have as much right as anybody to be left alone. And folks’ll definitely leave you alone if they think there’s been a little breakdown. My, yes.”

“What about Taylor?”

“Oh, yeah.” Quee runs out of steam with her lecture. Children change the whole operation regardless of what that operation might be.

“If not for Taylor, I’d have done all sorts of things, Quee.” It is only now with the mention of her son that there is some life in that washed-out body. “He is all that I have, and I want him to have a good life.”

“Yes, you’re right.”

Alicia leans forward and puts her face down against the table. She looks like there are no tears left in her, and it is one of those odd times when Quee has absolutely no idea what to say. She feels herself looming large and lifeless, clumsy and inadequate. It’s not a feeling that comes to her often.

“You know I’ll keep Taylor for you anytime,” she says now. “I love that little booger, you know it.”

“Yes.”

“You can move in if you like, anything, you name it.”

“I’ve got a lot to take care of,” Alicia says, voice slow and eyes closed. Upstairs, Tommy’s hammering is rhythmic and comforting, interrupted off and on by the thud and roll of a pecan on the metal awning over her kitchen window. Quee waits there until Alicia’s breathing is regular with the exhaustion that has finally taken over. She can see into the next room where Taylor is all set up in front of the television set, that big yellow bird marching around. It’s times like this she starts to hope there is no heaven and no afterlife. She hopes Lonnie is not looking down on her world right now.

Mack McCallister’s neighbors include a single mother of ethnic origin, who is into yard ornaments that reflect her Catholicism, and a bunch of twenty-year-olds who attend a small college in the next town and who, it seems, are majoring in beer drinking and peeing in the yard. The college kids are split up in two sides of a dilapidated duplex with peeling paint; they used to like to torture each other by blasting undesirable music back and forth. One night in the spring it was a war between Alan Sherman and Ray Stevens. When Mack heard “Hello, Muddah” for the third time and then “Guitarzan” for the eleventh, he went out on the lovely, lattice-trimmed porch of his perfectly renovated Queen Anne cottage and began shouting. “This isn’t the goddamned trailer park!” he said. He was barefooted and in his pajama pants. The music stopped, but there was a price to pay. There were seven scrawny-looking guys peeping at him from their windows, seven guys who were seeing him as the authority, the
other side
, the
what’s up your butt
breed. “Loosen up, dude,” one guy had shouted before being shushed by his friends.

“Yeah, right, like you never acted that way.” Sarah had been there, moving and talking; she stood in her thin cotton nightgown, half-hidden
by the screen door. “I think the first time I ever met you, you were wearing a toga and singing ‘Brick House’ into a long-neck Budweiser.” She slipped over and sat in the swing, her legs pulled up under her gown. They had only been in the house a month, the U-Haul boxes with his books still lining the wall. After ten years of criminal law in Raleigh, he had finally broken down and accepted her dad’s offer to join his firm. “You’re the son I never had,” her father kept saying, but what he really meant was that he had one child; he had Sarah, and he wanted her back in his and Sarah’s mother’s lives full-time.

She said it was her dream. She never wanted anything else but to be with all of the people she loves, and this house! She wanted this pale purple house her whole life. “It wasn’t always this color,” she had said when the Realtor brought them to see it. “It was white for many years, but now”—she ran her fingers along the porch rail—“the trim shows up beautifully. It would look good yellow or gray for that matter, if you don’t like it this color.”

“What?” he asked, far more concerned with the asking price and the foundation than the cosmetics. “Don’t like purple?”

“Mauve,” she said, “it’s mauve.” Her period was ten days late that time, and she was absolutely sure that she was pregnant. They had been trying for the past four years. “Say mauve,” she pinched his cheeks and kissed him, then fairly floated through the house. “Oh, it’s just as I imagined,” she said. “I always came here to trick-or-treat hoping that I’d get asked in, but a really old woman lived here and she rarely even came to the door.”

“I thought a banker lived here. The banker whose wife is a potter,” the Realtor said, seemingly upset that she didn’t know the whole history of this house. Sarah waved her hand. “There was even another family before them; they are the ones who painted it mauve. The wife
was from San Francisco and knew about these things, and then the husband got transferred back to Charlotte.” Sarah knew far more about the town’s real estate than their broker, who was not having to even try to sell the house. Clearly, as far as Sarah was concerned, it was sold.

“But think, now,” Mack said. “Everybody always says
location, location, location
.” He tilted his head in the direction of the duplex and then to the other little white house where the Virgin Mary stood smack between two mangy boxwoods.

“Well, but it’s not like I don’t know this town. I
know
this town!”

“But what about the neighborhood? What about the house in the new area?” He had liked the new houses they saw, the cathedral ceilings and Palladian windows, the big master baths with shower stalls and Jacuzzis.

“Up and coming,” the Realtor said. “That neighborhood is more or less the threshold into the
other
neighborhood that abuts it.” Sarah liked to imitate the Realtor, and whenever they were riding through town would refer to the
other
neighborhood. “In other words,
the
neighborhood.”

But there was no changing her mind. That was months ago, and now here he is with the college boys on one side and the illuminated Holy Mother on the other. He keeps hoping that he’ll turn and see Sarah there in the doorway, that there will be some act of grace, some voice saying that a mistake was made, rewind, start over. Somebody fucked up the instructions. The pretty little thirty-eight-year-old in Fulton, North Carolina, was not supposed to have an aneurism, but amnio, amniocentesis—she’s supposed to be pregnant, you idiot, not in a coma.

Next door, the guys are playing their music at a reasonable level. They are coming and going with their dates. They wave or nod
politely to him; they saw the ambulance that night, heard all of the commotion, saw him squat down and put his face against the stone steps and sob. They rarely have disco or Ray Stevens wars anymore. For all of their youth and wildness, they respect his sorrow. Mack watches them and feels like he’s from another time altogether. If not for the occasional sound of Eric Clapton or Mick Jagger, he would be. If not for the calls and regular visits from June, Sarah’s oldest friend, he might lose touch altogether.

They said it was something she had lived with since birth. Perhaps it was there
in utero
, waiting, ticking, feeding itself on her life. Maybe she had a sensation, a premonition, the kind that wakes you in the middle of the night, the kind you never breathe aloud. Every birthday balloon that popped, every firecracker on the Fourth of July, a foreshadowing of what she would one day suddenly feel there behind those pale blue eyes, a pressure that made her turn from the kitchen sink, her hands in yellow rubber gloves as she squeezed Spic & Span from a sponge. She was tackling the film of grease on the kitchen cabinets. She had the windows open and the lace curtain was moving back and forth, casting a filagreed shadow at her feet. “Mack,” she called, barely audible, and he got there just in time to see her reaching, dripping gloves, wide eyes. He got to her just in time to keep her head from hitting the floor, and he sat there for several minutes just stroking her hair, wetting a cool cloth for her head. She had fainted before. He was actually sitting there feeling
happy
, thinking that maybe this time she really was pregnant. Later he had cursed those old movies that have it happen that way. The woman gets light-headed and faints when with child. But not the healthy woman. That woman scrubs her kitchen and eats an enormous lunch and at night straddles her husband’s hips and laughs at the bulge of her body. The woman gets light-headed and faints when there’s a bomb in her brain, when
a vessel bursts open and fills her head with blood. He thinks of her there in the kitchen, and the sound that fills
his
mind is loud and rushing like the sound of a train, the sound of the surf, rushing, pounding. And yet it seems that it all happened without any sound at all.

DURING COLLEGE, MACK
had once seen two men in a bus station. It was hard to tell what their relationship might be. They could have been brothers or lovers, even father and son. Their gestures were wild, furious. One, or maybe both, deaf, so that their anger came out of their fingertips, harsh angry signs in absolute silence. It happened long before he met Sarah, long before he glimpsed any sense of his future, and yet now, for some reason, it’s a memory that haunts him. He thought of it a lot in the six weeks she was in the hospital, and now he thinks of it when he lies in his bed at night without her there beside him. The doctors insisted that a hospital bed be brought in; it would make the nurse’s job possible—the turning and the tubes, the bathing—but he is still resentful.

Sometimes he can’t help but wonder where his life would have gone if he had chosen another route, if he hadn’t asked her to marry him. He would be in a house somewhere, wife, a couple of kids, and the news would eventually reach him through an old fraternity buddy or somebody who had been in one of his classes and seen him with her all the time. He and his wife would have been at a cocktail party or have driven up to the football game and there, while eating and drinking out of the trunk of somebody’s Saab, somebody would have said, “Hey, Mack, remember that girl you dated for a while? That blond girl from the Kappa house?” And he would have put down his food and drink and sat there, stunned that something so horrible could happen to someone so young. Life would have continued in spite of the moment, his own life bright and lively, moving around
and behind him. He would have sent a card or some flowers like that old boyfriend of hers, TomCat, she had called him, who appeared at the door late one afternoon a couple of weeks ago.