Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger (40 page)

“Honey? Honey? What’s the matter?” Willie’s behind her now, he’s nuzzling her neck with his prickly beard, bringing her back, as he has done time and time again. Oh how she will miss him.

When Alice died, Roxy’s grief was like a big dark, windy place that she was lost in, like the old abandoned Preston mine shaft that they used to sneak up the mountain to visit when she was a girl — its long twisting corridors opening into a cavern so vast that the beam of your flashlight finally disappeared into darkness, illuminating nothing, while your voice bounced back and forth, back and forth, fainter and fainter. She had stayed in this cavern for months, refusing therapy and drugs and all Willie’s attempts to divert her, even for a little bit, until finally he let her be, and just tended her, waiting. For a long time Roxy was dedicated to that darkness, that intensity, sensing that to lose it would be to lose little Alice forever. This has proved partly true. But finally she went out and got a pedicure, she got her hair streaked again, she and Willie went to MerleFest, then he took her on that blues cruise. Lilah graduated from high school. Seth was accepted into law school at UVA, Todd got married. Livingston ran for governor, Roxy saw his big face every day on the billboard at the turn off the interstate to the Reliable Real Estate office where she worked.

“Honey? What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” she says, setting the table. “I guess we’d better go on and eat.”

Willie slices the ham while she puts a piece of corn bread and a helping of potato salad on each of their plates. She grabs the honey mustard from the refrigerator. “Okay, then,” she says. He puts on a CD and they sit down where they always sit, facing each other. The seashell cat smiles its iron smile at the end of the table. Elvis’s legs swing back and forth. “Time’s the revelator,” sings Gillian Welch. Roxy pushes potato salad around on her plate. Actually
she’s
the revelator, she is, Roxy.

She can tell, or not tell. She can tell it now, or later. Or not
at all. Never. But actually she doesn’t know if she’s capable of not telling it, of keeping such a big secret. She’s still so mad. She can’t eat a bite. She looks over at Willie, who’s almost finished already.

Suddenly he stands up. “This is big, isn’t it, baby? This is as big as it gets. Come on.” He pulls out her chair.

“What? Where do you think we’re going? I haven’t even done the dishes, you know. They’ll be back before long.”

“No they won’t,” he says. “And even if they are, so what? Come on. It’s a full moon out there. Let’s take a drive down the beach like we used to.”

“Right
now
?”

“Right now.” He’s got her by the shoulders, he’s hustling her along.

“I . . . I can’t,” she says, meaning,
I can’t do this, any of it, any longer. The truth is what you get with Roxy, she’s so reliable, you can count on her.

But he’s breathing into her hair.

“Why not?” he asks.

“I . . . I . . .”

Willie draws back. He stops pushing her. He’s waiting. Elvis’s legs swing back and forth, back and forth.
Down at the end of Lonely Street, it’s Heartbreak Hotel and I’m so lonely baby, I’m just so lonely I could die.
The hands of the clock move to nine.

“I’ve got to get a sweater.” Roxy darts into the bedroom and opens the closet door and pushes the tackle box back where it belongs, back into the back of the closet, and piles an old quilt and some outgrown jackets and coats on top for good measure. There now!
Archaeology.
Nobody will ever know the tackle box is back there, and Roxy will never read those letters again. She feels her
secret blooming like a great red rose inside her — a metaphor! Or, her secret is blooming like a great red rose
inside the garden of her body,
an extended metaphor, a beautiful image seen by no one. Known by no one except herself. Suddenly Roxy is damn proud of keeping this secret, of not hurting Willie, her soul mate, her old true love.

“Roxy, get a move on! What are you doing in there?” he’s yelling out in the hall.

“Just hold your horses!” she yells back, because she’s his equal now, isn’t she? Finally, after all these years. She thinks of herself and Frances on that seesaw Daddy made when lightning split the old poplar — two little sisters always teetering, but perfectly balanced. Another metaphor. She remembers Frances’s red wool coat and her flyaway dark curls in the April wind.

“Roxy, goddamnit! Come on!”

“Coming!” Roxy throws on her aqua scarf and grabs up the faux fur jacket she bought in Nashville. Outside it’s a big full moon but a windy night. Cold. Thank God he’s got the top up for once. She jumps in the convertible and Willie guns it down the driveway throwing sand everywhere. The seashell road stretches out white in the moonlight past all the dark houses ahead.
The road is a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor.
This is a poem from high school, when Roxy was Miss Rose Hill and potato salad queen.
May the road rise to meet you.
This is an old Irish toast that Willie taught her. Willie is Irish. But Roxy is nothing but Roxy, squealing as he accelerates, just like she used to do on the Ferris wheel, way up high. Then the houses are gone and they’re flying out toward the point past scrub pines and beach grass and sandy hills briefly illumined then lost in darkness as the land falls away behind them on either side. When they get to the little park at
the end, Willie slows down enough to drive across the parking lot, right past all the posted and stop signs then out between the dunes and onto the beach itself.

Surely they’ll be arrested.

Luckily it’s low tide.

The moon is as bright as a headlight making a path across the water straight to them, it reminds Roxy of that locomotive at the Bambi Lynn Motel, its headlight bearing down upon such scenes, good Lord, some of them against the law. Suddenly Willie switches off the lights and now there’s nothing but moonlight everywhere,
the moon lies fair upon the straits,
the wide beach rising to meet them like a ribbon of moonlight itself until suddenly it’s all obscured by a bank of clouds. Now Roxy can’t see a thing. It’s black as pitch, dark as a dungeon, dark as a mine. Roxy can’t see the water, she can’t see the sand or the dunes beyond. If they die out here, that’ll ruin Lilah’s big wedding for sure. Plus it would be so stupid. She grabs his jacket, then his arm.

“Now Stevie,” she says sternly. “You watch where you’re going, honey. It’s a mighty big ocean over there.”

“Shut up, Mama,” Stevie hollers. “You just stick with me,” as they keep on driving down the beach into the windy dark.

Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger

I
t was cocktail time. The sun, which had been in and out all day, now found a crack in the piles of gray cloud and shone brilliantly, falsely, down the length of the beach, even though thunder rolled on in the distance. The ocean was full of whitecaps. Its color went from a mean gray, far out near the horizon under those clouds, to steely blue patches closer in where the sun hit it. The tide was coming in, running about a foot higher than usual, eating up the beach, bunching the people on the beach closer and closer together. It was unreliable, irritating weather, unusual for August. A strong wind had come up after the most recent shower, blowing straight in from the ocean over the waves. This wind was perfect for kites and kites had sprung up everywhere, flown mostly by grandchildren who tangled their strings or let them get caught on TV antennas and then had to have another one, immediately, from El’s Hardware Store on the mainland. It was this day, August 25, nearing sunset, cocktail time in kite weather, when Mrs. Darcy received her first vision.

Below the house, Mrs. Darcy’s daughters had arranged themselves together on the beach. Tall, graceful women like flowers, they leaned delicately toward one another and sipped their gin and tonics and shouted into the wind. Their family resemblance was noticeable, if not particularly striking: the narrow forehead, the high cheekbones, the dark eyes set a fraction of an inch too close together: the long straight nose, rather imperious, aristocratic, and prone to sinus. They were good-looking women.

Yet try as she might — and she
had
tried, all their years of growing up — Mrs. Darcy was unable to find anything of herself in them. Mrs. Darcy was short, blonde, and overweight, with folds of flesh that dangled like dewlaps from her upper arms. She had been a pretty girl once, but she had never been a thin girl, or a fashionable girl, or a fashionable young woman. These girls took after their father; they had his long, thin hands. Inside the house, Mrs. Darcy leafed through the pile of craft books that Trixie had brought her, and looked down at her daughters on the beach. Craft books! Mrs. Darcy thought. Craft books. What does she know? Wrapping her robe about her, Mrs. Darcy moved to stand at the door.

“W
HAT WAS SHE DOING
when you came out?” Trixie asked. Trixie was the oldest, with three teenagers of her own. Her close-cut hair was streaked with gray, and her horn-rimmed glasses sat squarely on her nose. “What was she
doing
?” Trixie asked again, over the wind.

Maria, the middle sister, shifted her position on the quilt. “Not much, I think. Puttering around the kitchen.”

“Well, there’s nothing to do for supper,” Trixie pointed out. “It’s already done.”

“I don’t know,” said Maria, who always deliberated, or gave the impression of deliberating, before she spoke. “I think some of the children had come in and gotten a drink or something.”

“I tried to get her to help cook,” Trixie said. “Remember how she used to cook?”

“You know what really drove me mad?” Ginny said suddenly. “I was telling my shrink this the other day. I mean, whenever I think of Mama, you know what I think of her doing? I think of her putting leftovers in a smaller container. Like, say, we’ve had a roast, right? And if it were
me,
I’d leave the roast in the pan it was in. But oh no. After dinner, she had to find a smaller pan, right? For the refrigerator. Tupperware or something. The Tupperware post-roast container. Then somebody makes a sandwich maybe, and one inch of the roast is gone, so she had to find another container. Then another, then another, then another. She must have gone through about fifteen containers for every major thing she fixed. That’s all I can remember of childhood.” Ginny had been leaning forward intensely, sucking on a Winston in the wind. Now she stabbed the cigarette out in the sand and flung herself back flat and her long black hair fanned out on the quilt.

“You’re feeling very angry about this,” Maria said in her precise, well-modulated voice. Maria was a psychologist, married to another psychologist, Mark, who sat some thirty yards behind the sisters on the deck at the back of the house, observing things through his binoculars. “Your anger seems oddly out of proportion to the event,” Maria remarked.

“No kidding,” Ginny said.

One of Maria’s children, Andrew, came up to get his shoe tied. “
Why
can’t we buy any firecrackers?” he wailed, and then ran off, a blur of blue jean legs, without waiting for the answer.

“Now, then,” Trixie said. The wind had died down, it was possible to talk, and Trixie liked to get right to the heart of the matter. “It does seem to me, as I wrote to both of you, that a certain
amount of, er,
aimlessness
is understandable under the circumstances. But as I said before, when I went to Raleigh last month, I just couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe the way she was living. Dust on everything, and you know how she always was about dust. She was drinking Coca-Colas. Hawaiian Punch. Frozen pizza in the refrigerator —
pizza,
can you imagine?”

Maria smiled at the idea of pizza, the mere mention of it so incongruous with their childhood dinners in Raleigh. She remembered the long shining expanse of mahogany, the silver, the peacocks on the wallpaper, the crimson-flowered Oriental rug. “Pizza!” Maria said softly. “Pop would have died.”

“He did,” Ginny pointed out.

“Really!” Trixie said.

“I think there has to be a natural period of mourning,” Maria said, not meaning to lecture. “It’s absolutely essential in the cycle of regeneration.”

“But it’s not mourning, exactly,” Trixie said. “It’s just being not interested. Not interested in anything, that’s the only way I can describe it. Lack of interest in life.”

“I can understand that,” Ginny said.

“That could be a form of mourning,” Maria said. “No two people mourn alike, of course.”

“Different strokes for different folks,” Ginny said. They ignored her.

“But you know how she used to keep herself so busy all the time,” Trixie said. “She always had some craft project going, always. She was always doing volunteer work, playing bridge, you know how she was.”

“She wore spectator heels and stockings every day,” Ginny said in a passing-judgment tone.

“Yes, well, that’s what I mean,” Trixie went on. “And now what is she wearing? Rubber flip-flops from Kmart. She’s let Lorene go, too. Lorene only comes in once a week now and does the bathrooms and the floors.”

“I can’t imagine that house without Lorene,” Maria said. Lorene had been a central figure in their girlhood, skinny as Olive Oyl in her starched white uniform.

“Well, Lorene is just as worried about Mama as she can be,” Trixie said. “As you might well imagine. I went over to see her in the projects and gave her some money and I wrote down my number for her, at home, and told her to call me up any time. Any time she goes over there to clean and anything worries her.”

“That’s a good idea, Trixie,” Maria said.

“Well,” Trixie said. Trixie saw her two daughters, tan, leggy Richmond girls, far down the beach, walking toward them in the foaming line of surf. “I’ll tell you what I told Mother,” Trixie continued. “I said, ‘Why don’t you start going to church again? Why don’t you join one of these retirement clubs in town? They have all sorts of them now, you wouldn’t believe it. They go to the mountains and they go to New York to see plays and everything is all arranged for them ahead of time. Why, we saw a group of them at Disney World in Florida, having a perfectly wonderful time!’ “