Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger (14 page)

“I think she looks some better today, don’t you?” Harold asks.

“No,” Tammy Lynn says. She has a flat little redneck voice. She sounds just the way she did last summer when she told Cherry that what she saw in the field was a cotton picker working at night, and not a UFO at all. “I wish I did but I don’t, Harold. I’m going to go on home now and heat up some Beanee Weenee for Mamaw. You come on as soon as you can.”

“Well,” Harold says. He feels like things have gotten all turned around here some way, he feels like he’s the kid and Tammy Lynn has turned into a freaky little grown-up. He says, “I’ll be along directly.”

But they both know he won’t leave until Lois Hickey throws him out. And speaking of Lois, as soon as Tammy Lynn takes off, here she comes again, checking something on the respirator, making a little clucking sound with her mouth, then whirling to leave. When Lois walks, her panty girdle goes swish, swish, swish at the top of her legs. She comes right back with the young black man named Rodney Broadbent, Respiratory Therapist. It says so on his name badge. Rodney wheels a complicated-looking cart ahead of himself. He’s all built up, like a weightlifter.

“How you doing tonight, Mr. Stipe?” Rodney says.

“I think she’s some better,” Harold says.

“Well, lessee here,” Rodney says. He unhooks the respirator tube at Cherry’s throat, sticks the tube from his own machine down the opening, and switches on the machine. It makes a whirring sound. It looks like an electric ice cream mixer. Rodney Broadbent looks at Lois Hickey in a significant way as she turns to leave the room.

They don’t have to tell him, Harold knows. Cherry is worse, not better. Harold gets the Chick-fil-A, unwraps it, eats it, and then goes over to the stand by the window. It’s already getting dark. The big mercury arc light glows in the hospital parking lot. A little wind blows some trash around on the concrete. He has had Cherry three years, that’s all. One trip to Disney World, two vacations at Gulf Shores, Alabama, hundreds of nights in the old metal bed out at the farm with Cherry sleeping naked beside him, her arm thrown over his stomach. They had a million laughs.

“Alrightee,” Rodney Broadbent nearly sings, unhooking his machine. Harold turns to look at him. Rodney Broadbent certainly looks more like a middle linebacker than a respiratory therapist. But Harold likes him.

“Well, Rodney?” Harold says.

Rodney starts shadow-boxing in the middle of the room. “Tough times,” he says finally. “These is tough times, Mr. Stipe.” Harold stares at him. Rodney is light on his feet as can be.

Harold sits down in the chair by the respirator. “What do you mean?” he asks.

“I mean she is drowning, Mr. Stipe,” Rodney says. He throws a punch which lands real close to Harold’s left ear. “What I’m doing here, see, is suctioning. I’m pulling all the fluid up out of her lungs. But now looka here, Mr. Stipe, they is just too damn much of it. See this little doohickey here I’m measuring it with? This here is the danger zone, man. Now Mrs. Stipe, she has been in the danger zone for some time. They is just too much damn fluid in there. What she got, anyway? Cancer and pneumonia both, am I right? What can I tell you, man? She is
drowning.
” Rodney gives Harold a short affectionate punch in the ribs, then wheels his cart away. From the door, apparently struck by some misgivings, he says, “Well, man, if it was me, I’d want to know what the story is, you follow me, man? If it was me, what I’m saying.” Harold can’t see Rodney anymore, only hear his voice from the open door.

“Thank you, Rodney,” Harold says. He sits in the chair. In a way he has known this already, for quite some time. In a way, Rodney’s news is no news, to Harold. He just hopes he will be man enough to bear it, to do what will have to be done. Harold has always been scared that he is not man enough for Cherry
Oxendine anyway. This is his worst secret fear. He looks around the little Intensive Care room, searching for a sign, some sign, anything, that he will be man enough. Nothing happens. Cherry lies strapped to the bed, flanked by so many machines that it looks like she’s in the cockpit of a jet. Her eyes are closed, eyelids fluttering, red spots on her freckled cheeks. Her chest rises and falls as the respirator pushes air in and out through the tube in her neck. He doesn’t see how she can sleep in the bright light of Intensive Care, where it is always noon. And does she dream? Cherry used to tell him her dreams, which were wild, long Technicolor dreams, like movies. Cherry played different parts in them. If you dream in color, it means you’re intelligent, Cherry said. She used to tease him all the time. She thought Harold’s own dreams were a stitch, dreams more boring than his life, dreams in which he’d drive to Jackson, say, or be washing his car.

“Harold?” It’s Ray Muncey, manager of the Food Lion at the mall.

“Why, what are you doing over here, Ray?” Harold asks, and then in a flash he
knows,
Lois Hickey must have called him, to make Harold go on home.

“I was just driving by and I thought, Hey, maybe Harold and me might run by the Holiday Inn, get a bite to eat.” Ray shifts from foot to foot in the doorway. He doesn’t come inside, he’s not supposed to, nobody but immediate family is allowed in Intensive Care, and Harold’s glad — Cherry would just die if people she barely knows, like Ray Muncey, got to see her looking so bad.

“No, Ray, you go on and eat,” Harold says. “I already ate. I’m leaving right now anyway.”

“Well, how’s the missus doing?” Ray is a big man, afflicted with big, heavy manners.

“She’s drowning,” Harold says abruptly. Suddenly he remembers Cherry in a water ballet at the town pool, it must have been the summer of junior year, Fourth of July, Cherry and the other girls floating in a circle on their backs to form a giant flower — legs high, toes pointed. Harold doesn’t know it when Ray Muncey leaves. Out the window, the parking lot light glows like a big full moon. Lois Hickey comes in. “You’ve got to go home now, Harold,” she says. “I’ll call if there’s any change.” He remembers Cherry at Glass Lake, on the senior class picnic. Cherry’s getting real agitated now, she tosses her head back and forth, moves her arms. She’d pull out the tubes if she could. She kicks off the sheet. Her legs are still good, great legs in fact, the legs of a beautiful young woman.

H
AROLD AT SEVENTEEN
was tall and skinny, brown hair in a soft flat crew cut, glasses with heavy black frames. His jeans were too short. He carried a pen-and-pencil set in a clear plastic case in his breast pocket. Harold and his best friend, Ben Hill, looked so much alike that people had trouble telling them apart. They did everything together. They built model rockets, they read every science fiction book they could get their hands on, they collected Lionel train parts and Marvel comics. They loved superheroes with special powers, enormous beings who leaped across rivers and oceans. Harold’s friendship with Ben Hill kept the awful loneliness of the only child at bay, and it also kept him from having to talk to girls. You couldn’t talk to those two, not seriously. They were giggling and bumping into each other all the time. They were immature.

So it was in Ben’s company that Harold experienced the most private, the most
personal
memory he has of Cherry Oxendine in
high school. Oh, he also has those other memories you’d expect, the big public memories of Cherry being crowned Miss Green-wood High (for her talent; she surprised everybody by reciting “Abou Ben Adhem” in such a stirring way that there wasn’t a dry eye in the whole auditorium when she got through), or running out onto the field ahead of the team with the other cheerleaders, red curls flying, green and white skirt whirling out around her hips like a beach umbrella when she turned a cartwheel. Harold noticed her then, of course. He noticed her when she moved through the crowded halls of the high school with her walk that was almost a prance, she put a little something extra into it, all right. Harold noticed Cherry Oxendine then in a way that he noticed Sandra Dee on the cover of a magazine, or Annette Funicello on
American Bandstand.

But such girls were not for the likes of Harold, and Harold knew it. Girls like Cherry always had boyfriends like Lamar Peebles, who was hers — a doctor’s son with a baby blue convertible and plenty of money. They used to drive around town in his car, smoking cigarettes. Harold saw them, as he carried out grocery bags. He did not envy Lamar Peebles, or wish he had a girl like Cherry Oxendine. Only something about them made him stand where he was in the Food Lion lot, watching, until they had passed from sight.

So Harold’s close-up encounter with Cherry was unexpected. It took place at the senior class picnic, where Harold and Ben had been drinking beer all afternoon. No alcohol was allowed at the senior class picnic, but some of the more enterprising boys had brought out kegs the night before and hidden them in the woods. Anybody could go back there and pay some money and get some beer. The chaperones didn’t know, or appeared not to know. In
any case, the chaperones all left at six o’clock, when the picnic was officially over. Some of the class members left then too. Then some of them came back with more beer, more blankets. It was a free lake. Nobody could
make
you go home. Normally, Harold and Ben would have been among the first to leave, but because they had had four beers apiece, and because this was the first time they had ever had
any
beer ever, at all, they were still down by the water, skipping rocks and waiting to sober up so that they would not wreck Harold’s mother’s green Valiant on the way home. All the cool kids were on the other side of the lake, listening to transistor radios. The sun went down. Bullfrogs started up. A mist came out all around the sides of the lake. It was a cloudy, humid day anyway, not a great day for a picnic.

“If God is really God, how come He let Himself get crucified, is what I want to know,” Ben said. Ben’s daddy was a Holiness preacher, out in the county.

But Harold heard something. “Hush, Ben,” he said.

“If I was God, I would go around and really kick some ass,” Ben said.

Harold heard it again. It was almost too dark to see.

“Damn.” It was a girl’s voice, followed by a splash.

All of a sudden, Harold felt sober. “Who’s there?” he asked. He stepped forward, right up to the water’s edge. Somebody was in the water. Harold was wearing his swim trunks under his jeans, but he had not gone in the water himself. He couldn’t stand to show himself in front of people. He thought he was too skinny.

“Well,
do something.
” It was the voice of Cherry Oxendine, almost wailing. She stumbled up the bank. Harold reached out and grabbed her arm. Close up, she was a mess, wet and muddy, with her hair all over her head. But the thing that got Harold, of
course, was that she didn’t have any top on. She didn’t even try to cover them up either, she stomped her little foot on the bank and said, “I am going to
kill
Lamar Peebles when I get ahold of him.” Harold had never even imagined so much skin.

“What’s going on?” asked Ben, from up the bank.

Harold took off his own shirt as fast as he could and handed it over to Cherry Oxendine. “Cover yourself,” he said.

“Why, thank you.” Cherry didn’t bat an eye. She took his shirt and put it on, tying it stylishly at the waist. Harold couldn’t believe it. Close up, Cherry was a lot smaller than she looked on the stage or the football field. She looked up at Harold through her dripping hair and gave him her crooked grin.

“Thanks, hey?” she said.

And then she was gone, vanished into the mist and trees before Harold could say another word. He opened his mouth and closed it. Mist obscured his view. From the other side of the lake he could hear “Ramblin’ Rose” playing on somebody’s radio. He heard a girl’s high-pitched giggle, a boy’s whooping laugh.

“What’s going on?” asked Ben.

“Nothing,” Harold said. It was the first time he had ever lied to Ben. Harold never told anybody what had happened that night, not ever. He felt that it was up to him to protect Cherry Oxendine’s honor. Later, much later, when he and Cherry were lovers, he was astonished to learn that she couldn’t remember any of this, not who she was with or what had happened or what she was doing in the lake like that with her top off, or Harold giving her his shirt. “I think that was sweet, though,” Cherry told him.

When Harold and Ben finally got home that night at nine or ten o’clock, Harold’s mother was frantic. “You’ve been drinking,”
she shrilled at him under the hanging porch light. “And where’s your shirt?” It was a new madras shirt that Harold had gotten for graduation. Now Harold’s mother is out at the Hillandale Rest Home. Ben died in Vietnam, and Cherry is drowning. This time, and Harold knows it now, he can’t help her.

O
H
, C
HERRY
! W
OULD
SHE
have been so wild if she hadn’t been so cute? And what if her parents had been younger when she was born — normal-age parents — couldn’t they have controlled her better? As it was, the Oxendines were sober, solid people living in a farmhouse out near the county line, and Cherry lit up their lives like a rocket. Her dad, Martin “Buddy” Oxendine, went to sleep in his chair every night right after supper, woke back up for the eleven o’clock news, and then went to bed for good. Buddy was an elder in the Baptist church. Cherry’s mom, Gladys Oxendine, made drapes for people. She assumed she would never have children at all because of her spastic colitis. Gladys and Buddy had started raising cockapoos when they gave up on children. Imagine Gladys’s surprise, then, to find herself pregnant at thirty-eight, when she was already old! They say she didn’t even know it when she went to the doctor. She thought she had a tumor.

But then she got so excited, that old farm woman, when Dr. Grimwood told her what was what, and she wouldn’t even consider an abortion when he mentioned the chances of a mongoloid. People didn’t use to have babies so old then as they do now, so Gladys Oxendine’s pregnancy was the talk of the county. Neighbors crocheted little jackets and made receiving blankets. Buddy built a baby room onto the house and made a cradle by hand. During the last two months of pregnancy, when Gladys had to stay in
bed because of toxemia, people brought over casseroles and boiled custard, everything good. Gladys’s pregnancy was the only time in her whole life that she was ever pretty, and she loved it, and she loved the attention, neighbors in and out of the house. When the baby was finally born on November 1, 1944, no parents were ever more ready than Gladys and Buddy Oxendine. And the baby was everything they hoped for too, which is not usually the case — the prettiest baby in the world, a baby like a little flower.