Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger (11 page)

And it was. It is. As we walked down the street, my heart got lighter and lighter with each step. I was glad to be caught! Mr. Martin and Mr. Perkins spoke to everybody we passed. A summer storm was blowing up by then, as you may recall. Wind whipped down the sidewalk, clouds tore across the sky. Mr. Longstreet Perkins had to hold on to his famous straw hat. It started thundering. Suddenly I felt the way I used to feel when Sissy and me were kids. We’d run up on the top of the mountain to whirl around and around whenever a storm came up. You can smell the lightning in the air, which is real exciting, it doesn’t smell like anything else in the world. So that’s how I felt, walking down the sidewalk to this jail. Drops of rain as big as silver dollars splattered on the sidewalk. We were getting real wet. My hair lay plastered in strings all down my face. Lightning flashed. It kept on thundering. But my heart rose like a bird with each step we took until I was flying, flying up through the electric air and out among the clouds.

Ultima Thule

Y
ou’ll remember to get the Thule put on top of the Volvo, then?” On his way over to the university, Jake turns back to ask her. “And make sure the key works?” He hands her this little bitty key.

“Sure,” Nova says, rubbing her eyes, wearing a black number three muscle shirt that used to be her brother’s, and nothing else. She knows she can get Theron to do it. “The drug boys are coming today,” she says, and Jake nods. He is on the board of Agape, the residential drug treatment program which runs the landscaping and lawn care business that comes to work at their little farm outside Charlottesville, which is not really a farm, any more than they are really farmers, or Jake is an average graduate student, or they are a regular young couple just trying to make ends meet.

No. The big surprise is that Jake has turned out to belong to a very rich family, rich enough to own an entire island in Maine, for instance, which is where they are heading tomorrow morning at the crack of dawn in the Volvo with the Thule on top of it like an enormous coffin filled with their clothes because the dogs will be taking up all the space in the car — Thor, Jake’s old black lab, in the backseat, and Odin, the big husky pup, in the back-back. Everybody in Jake’s family owns big dogs that wear bandannas
and go to Maine. Nova has been there once, last year, when she and Jake had just gotten married.

Everybody in Jake’s family called her “The Bride” in a tongue-in-cheek way that made her nervous at first, until she figured out that’s just how they all talk, like they are putting quotation marks around everything. Nova recognizes irony, which is what Mrs. Stevenson, her senior English teacher, defined as, “Irony is when the fire chief’s house burns down.” Part of the irony in calling her “The Bride” came from the fact that Nova was already pregnant, she knew this, too.

“No, this is great, this is awesome, this is seriously great,” Jake’s brother had assured her in Maine. “We always figured he was gay.”

Now Jake blows her a kiss from the yard before he drives off in his old truck. Nova has never known a man before who would blow anybody a kiss, ever, under any circumstances. She rubs her flat stomach, fingering the navel ring. Jake took pictures of her pregnancy, every few days. He used rolls and rolls of film. She lost that baby at five and a half months, and it was a girl, they said. Nova had wanted a girl, she would have taken such good care of it, not like her own mother at all. Nova and Jake had already bought a crib, and gotten Agape to paint the extra bedroom tangerine, her idea. Nova has plenty of ideas, she is not dumb at all. Jake has made her realize this. Now they have closed the door to the little tangerine room, until later.

Good thing they’ve got these two dogs, which keep her busy, sort of. Nova likes the dogs, but she did not like Maine, an entire state that smells like Pine-Sol, especially Blueberry Island, a very cold and foggy place that is far away from everything, especially the grocery store. Nova does like to cook and it drove her crazy
not to be able to go to the grocery store every day, which is what she likes to do at home. Also, the water will freeze your ass off and the grocery store does not even carry grits. Also, there is no TV on Blueberry Island, something Jake forgot to mention in all the times he talked about the island like it was paradise. The only positive thing was that all the Maine women turned out to be big and ugly, almost as if they were doing it on purpose, so this made Nova look like a beauty queen. You should see these women! Nobody wears any makeup or nice clothes. Their hair sticks out on one side and looks awful. This is also true of Jake’s mother and sisters, at least in the summertime. Nova does not know if they look any better during the rest of the year or not.

She and Jake did not go up to Connecticut for Christmas, although they were invited, because this is when Nova lost the baby and had to spend several days in the University of Virginia Hospital, very ironic considering that is where she and Jake first met, though Jake was over in Neuro sciences and she was working the cash register in the snack bar on the first floor. Jake had been in the hospital for three months when she met him, this is why he had a blue badge and was allowed to come down to the first floor unsupervised. Later he would get a town pass, and still later a day pass that would allow him to take her to the Boars Head Inn and fuck her eyes out. Yes! His brothers would have been so surprised. Nova had never been to the Boars Head Inn before, although she had lived outside Charlottesville all her life. Their room had a sixty-inch TV hidden away inside an antique hutch, she was so surprised. Also a minibar.

Nova had noticed Jake right away because he was so thin. Most of the mental patients are real fat, it is due to their medications. Jake was also sweet, not usually true of doctors or patients either
one. The day they met, he was standing patiently in line behind that heavy woman with the big blonde hairdo growing out black at the roots who was so pushy and bought the same thing every day, a cheeseburger and fries and strawberry shortcake, and had a fit whenever they didn’t have the strawberry shortcake. That day she forgot her money. When Nova handed her the little piece of paper, she started to cry. The woman had a black mustache, which drove Nova crazy, Nova has got sort of an obsession about facial hair. Maybe she should slip this woman some Nair. “Just go on,” Nova told her, looking all around first. “You can pay me tomorrow.”

“Oh no . . . I . . .” The woman began to flap her hands.

“Here. Keep the change,” Jake said, popping up behind the woman, handing over a ten-dollar bill.

“I’m not allowed to do that,” Nova said as the woman started to cry.

“Just add my bill onto hers, then,” Jake said.

The woman cried louder, big sobs coming up out of her cleavage.

“Here now, ma’am.” He took the woman by the elbow and steered her over to a table, pulling out a chair for her.

Nova rang up the woman’s food again, along with three little bowls of macaroni and cheese, and coffee. “That’s not a very balanced meal,” she said to him when he came back.

“Well.” Jake grinned at her. “I’m not a very balanced man. I’m crazy.”

“What’s your diagnosis?” Nova knew she wasn’t supposed to ask.

“Life,” he said. “What’s your name?”

“Nova,” she said. “Named for the car, not the star. My mother got pregnant at a drive-in.”

Nova thought he looked like one of those cornhusk dolls her granny used to make, with thin, thin corn silk hair flopping onto his face and a long thin stick nose and big even teeth like a row of corn on the cob and beautiful huge blue eyes like lakes, swimming behind his thick glasses. Or she was swimming in his eyes, that’s more like it. Suddenly Nova became very critical of Raymond Crabtree who had given her this job for certain considerations, he had steel blue jaws by five o’clock, and lived for
Monday Night Football.

“You don’t seem very crazy to me,” Nova heard herself say, though really he was so thin and pale, he was not her type at all.

“I guess you’ll have to get to know me, then,” Jake said, and so she did, and still he never did seem very crazy to her, only too sensitive for this world. Jake used to be a rock musician and play in bands, she learned, but now he was a graduate student in American Studies. He used to do a lot of drugs, but now he does oral histories with people such as lobster fishermen in Maine and the drug boys who work for Agape. He has already taped Theron.

The first time Nova went up to visit Jake in the third-floor dayroom in Neurosciences, a skinny blonde woman came over and hugged him and turned to Nova and told her, “You may not know it, but this is Jesus Christ.”

“Wow,” Nova said.

“All the girls say that,” Jake said.

Jake played Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major and “Bridge over Troubled Water” for Nova on the piano they had brought into the dayroom for him. Nova started to visit him every afternoon when she got off lunch duty, and one time when she was up there, this little old black man went over and leaned against the piano and started scat-singing along when Jake was playing blues. “I was
born down in Savannah,” he sang, “under a ugly star.” Nurses and aides and other patients gathered around to hear him; this little man had not said a single word since he had been admitted to the hospital months before. Nobody knew who he was or where he had come from or anything of his history. They wrote it down as he sang it, accompanied by Jake.

When Jake got out of the hospital, Nova moved out to his weird house in the country with him. Raymond Crabtree was mad at her now, so she couldn’t afford her apartment anymore, but she didn’t tell Jake that, and it didn’t matter anyway, because by then she was pregnant.

“Honey, if I was you I’d make a good thing of this,” Nova’s mother said, smoking a cigarette, when Nova went to ask her for money at the dry cleaners where she worked. “You’re crazy if you don’t.” Of course Nova’s mother didn’t have any money anyway.

And really, Jake was so happy when she told him, and so sweet, he was putty in Nova’s hands. She told him she didn’t believe in abortion. They got married at the big courthouse downtown. Nova wore a beautiful midcalf flowered dress with a low lacy neckline, while Jake wore some old army pants and a tux jacket. By then she was catching on to how rich people will wear just any old thing. The witnesses at their wedding were a courthouse secretary named Alice Robinson and a black prostitute named Shawndra Day who had been sitting out in the hall waiting to see her court-appointed attorney. Then Jake took Nova down to Richmond for a night in the Jefferson Hotel with its crocodile sculpture and its great dome of stained glass in the lobby like a cathedral, the closest Nova has ever been to one.

When they got back to Charlottesville, there was
his
mother, leaning up against her car parked beside the mailbox. Her car was
a navy blue Mercedes with smoked windows, you couldn’t tell if she had a driver or anybody else in there with her or not. Jake’s mother has dyed red hair and anorexia nervosa even at her age, Nova could tell right off. She recognizes a mental illness when she sees one. Jake’s mother’s name is Barbara.

Jake got out of the car and Barbara ran over to fling her arms around him dramatically, like a person in a movie. “I can’t believe you would do this to me,” she sobbed. Jake patted her while extricating himself as best he could, motioning for Nova to get out of the Volvo. “Barbara,” he said, “here she is. This is Nova.” But Barbara cut loose again and would not even look at her.
Well fuck this,
Nova thought, standing there.

Then the drivers side door of the blue Mercedes opened and Jake’s father got out, a horsey-looking man in khaki pants and a pale blue denim shirt. He came over and took both of Nova’s hands in his, looking into her eyes in a way that made Nova trust him immediately, as well as feel sort of bad about herself. “Welcome to the family, dear,” he said.

“Won’t you come in?” Nova said.

“No,” said Barbara.

“Sure,” said Mr. Valentine.

They had ginger ale and stale cookies and strained conversation, with Barbara sniffling on the old truck seat that served as a sofa, looking all around the crazy living room. “Folk art,” Jake explained as his mother took in the old signs and homemade art on the walls, and the chain-saw angel, and the barber’s chair that Mr. Valentine was sitting in. Nova went along with Barbara on this. She could not understand why anybody wouldn’t have nice comfortable furniture if they could afford it. She hates that chain-saw angel. Nova said she wasn’t feeling well and excused herself.
So they didn’t know that she was standing right there in the overgrown grape arbor when they left, that she saw Mr. Valentine poke Jake in the side and say, “Way to go!” as Jake turned to leave, or that she heard Barbara say, “I don’t like her,” when he was out of earshot. “At least he’s not gay,” Mr. Valentine said as he got in the car.

Now Jake’s parents are already in Maine, on the island, with a cook and a housekeeper and a “man” who live in little log cabins out in the piney woods and do everything for them. Nova stands at the screen door and thinks about everything she has got to do to get ready for the trip, besides getting Theron and his boys to put the Thule on top of the Volvo, that’s the least of it. Nova does not see why she can’t have decent help instead of drug addicts and and crazy people, why they can’t have a nice house, why they have to go back to the land. Nova would like to get away from the land! She doesn’t understand why they have to go to Maine instead of Hilton Head Island, which is where anybody in their right mind who could afford it would surely go.

But now Nova has got to clean out the refrigerator and wash a load of clothes and go in to town to buy more dog food and sign that little thing in the post office that will cancel their mail delivery while they are gone, though she never gets any mail anyway except stuff from the community college now that Jake has signed her up to take some courses in the fall. She has got to read
The Scarlet Letter
first, which looks awful. Mrs. Stevenson used to want her to go to college too, but then Nova ran off with her mother’s boyfriend’s brother, a disc jockey from Columbia, South Carolina, ending up in Myrtle Beach doing some things that did not require a degree of any kind. Nova runs her finger along the screen door, she knows she’s procrastinating. Actually
procrastinating
was a word on the GED that Nova just did so well on.