The Reading Lessons (35 page)

“That was a memorable day to me,” she whispered.

“What day?” he growled, but when she began to speak again, he recognized the words of Dickens. He recognized Pip. 

 “
That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me . . . 
”
Lucinda stopped. She was not one to quote things well or acturately. “How does it go, Hadley?”

Hadley ground his teeth. He remembered quotes like Mama remembered the Bible. He had an especially good memory for all things Pip.

 
“
But, it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day
.” 

“You know it well.”

“You made me say it twenty or more times until I got it exactly right, as I recall.”

“And you got it exactly right. You always did.”

 “Don’t do this to me, Lucinda.” 

“Hold me,” she said. 

And so, of course, he did. 

###

Note to the wise gardener: Early pruning is essential. Without training, wisteria has the capacity to fill every available space. 

Hadley looked at the clock. 

4:55 a.m. 

What am I doing?
he asked himself. Lucinda had just slipped out of the house. At eight o’clock, he’d been in bed with Vassie, convinced he was on his way to a new and better life. Vaseline was a good lady, and she didn’t kick him out of bed when she saw his tattoo. Instead, she tried to be playful about it. 

 “I’ve had my share of surprises when I’ve unbuttoned a man’s pants, but you, sir, take the prize.”

He prayed she wouldn’t ask what the “M” stood for.

“What happened to you?” was what she asked.

“I’ve made a few mistakes, is all.” 

Vassie nodded, like she understood, and Hadley was grateful she was such an understanding woman.

How could it be that by four a.m. he had his arms around Lucinda? 

“Hadley, do you remember when we used to play Great Expectations?” By that point, Lucinda was holding on for dear life. “You sat at my little tea table with your curls all combed down, and we put you in Daddy’s brown tie. You looked so darned cute. And in your Pip-iest voice, you said:
It was impossible for me to separate her, in the past or in the present, from the innermost life of my life.
”

“I probably didn’t even understand what those words meant, Lucinda.”

“But you did. You memorized all the good Pip parts, and you always said them with such feeling. Don’t you remember?”

Hadley remembered. “
I, trembling in spirit and worshipping the very hem of her dress,
”
he quoted. “
She, quite composed and most decidedly not worshipping the hem of mine.
”

“Oh Hadley,” she said, and there was a geniune look of regret in her eyes. “What wonderful days those were.”
 

###

To make up for all the hugging he’d done with Lucinda, the following Friday Hadley took Vassie for a T-bone steak at
Big Harry’s Steak and Spaghetti House
. 

“How can you afford Big Harry’s?” Vassie asked.
Big Harry’s
was known for two things: T-bones and high prices.

“Are you kidding? Before you came along, I hadn’t had a proper date in twenty years. I’ve got enough for Tahiti if you want to go.”

Vassie laughed. “The boys would burn the house to the ground if I did. I’m afraid we’d have to take them with us.”

He pictured himself playing on the beach with a big, rambunctious family. “That’d be nice,” Hadley said. Of course, he didn’t have the money to buy her family dinner at
Big Harry’s,
much less take them to Tahiti, but judging by the way Vassie looked at him, he figured it was the thought that counts.

The A boys had taken a liking to him after he helped them put a
Radio Ace
together. Vaseline liked him better after that too. “In all their days, I’ve never known them to sit still for five minutes at a stretch, and that includes their time in the womb. I wish their father would take a minute out of his lazy, drunkard life and teach them how to build something.”

Hadley didn’t know a thing about raising boys, but it seemed to him that Vassie’s bunch could use some male influence. 

“I wonder if Andrew, Atticus, Anthone, Amber, and Armstrong would like to go to a stunt show instead of Tahiti?” he asked. “I heard Skip Fordyce is coming through next month.” 

Vassie clapped a hand over her mouth and promptly declared Hadley the man of her dreams. No one had ever remembered all her boys’ names before, she said. “If you say ‘em three times fast, I’ll ball your brains out in the Lady’s Room right now.” 

“Gosh,” Hadley said. “It doesn’t take much to please you, does it?” 

“Shoot. My own mother can’t even remember all their names.” She toasted him with her gin sour. “Speaking of my mother, she’s keeping the boys until tomorrow.”

Hadley had already made up his mind to get a T-bone, yet he stared at his menu as if the Spaghetti was tempting him, too. “I have to work in the morning, Vassie.”

“What time?”

“Six sharp.”

“So you’ll stay until five.”

He put down his menu. “I don’t know, Vassie.” It struck him that she wouldn’t be calling him the man of her dreams if she knew how wrapped up he still was with Lucinda.

“Do you like me?”

“Very much.”

“Then stay until five. I want to show you my laboratory.”

###

The lilac house smelled of flowers and dirty socks. Sock sweat hit one’s nose first. Honeysuckle followed. The front room had been girled up with lace doilies and a butter-colored love seat with pink fringy pillows. This was Vassie’s “shop”. Hadley had learned that the kitchen, bathroom, and bedrooms were fair game for anything, and thus the lot of were hopelessly littered with cap guns, crayons, hammers, and busted tire rims. But the shop was off limits. The boys had to come and go through the backdoor to keep down on the dirt. 

Vassie had covered a gate-leg table with her mother’s needlepoint, and she displayed her soaps and perfumes in a pretty row on top. What made the place shine though were all the delicate little fineries she’d added. Fake pearls bumped against bottles of lemon yellow and baby pink glass. Vassie had snipped the pearls off a necklace her husband gave her on their first anniversary and put them to a better use. Likewise, she rescued bows off old shoes and lace trim from worn-out slips. Once, she’d come across a dress in a trashcan that had cigarette burns on the sleeves, and she salvaged three jewel buttons that later got glued on the lid of a hand cream jar. That same hand cream jar sold the next day for three pennies more than what she usually asked, and this was in no small part thanks to the buttons. 

“There’s three of us in blackie town that put up perfume,” she told Hadley. “But I’m the only one to offer real jewel buttons on her lids.”

The front room was where Vassie conducted business. The cologne water was made elsewhere. She pulled a wooden ladder down from the second floor ceiling and led him up to the attic. Attics, as a rule, made Hadley nervous.

Up top, they stepped into a large room with a pyramid roof and an unfinished floor. A wall of boxes divided broken lamps, a crib, and Christmas lights from the heady heart of the
Darratu
operation. 

No stench of socks prevailed here. It was pure verbena and lavender oil. On a sawhorse table, cardamom seeds and cloves soaked in saucers of rum. Tuberrose bathed in vodka. There were orris root for sashets and cinnamon sticks for smelling salts.
Bacon Shampoo
filled old syrup bottles. And along the windowsill, a line of colored jars lit up in the moonlight like stained glass, giving the place a strangely sacred feel. 

“Most people don’t realize this, but making perfume is an art,” Vassie explained. “There’s some that think you just drop a few petals in some booze and away you go. Well, I’ve got news for those people: making perfume is every bit as complex as painting a picture of a meadow, only with perfume, scent is your paint brush. If you’re aiming to make a masterpiece, it’s real delicate work. Perfume is not about smelling like a rose. Just like a canvas ain’t never gonna be a meadow, a rose is always gonna do a better job of smelling like a rose than a person’s skin. Perfume is about the feeling a man gets when he touches his lips to a girl’s wrist.” 

“It’s the same with gardening,” Hadley said. “No living person can touch what God does with flowers in the wild. If a man’s garden doesn’t stir up anything different when you look at it, then what’s it for?”

“It’s the language of flowers,” Vassie said.

Hadley nodded. This kind of talk was filling him with uncomfortable excitement. This was that moment, sometimes longed for, sometimes not, that happens every once in a great while between two people, like with Lucinda and books. Or Flora and everything. It was the sort of moment that can make even the most practical of men throw their lot in with fate, whole-heartedly accepting that there is something bigger at work than just the convenient happanstance of a waitress appearing with a pot of coffee when you’re in desperate need of a date.

Then again, maybe it was nothing special at all. Maybe everybody was the same, living one life on the outside of their skin, and a whole other life on the inside?
The inner-most life of a life.
Hadley was perfectly capable of sweating buckets and working his outside parts to blisters, while his inner book-obsesssed-self locked fingers with Fitzgerald’s Daisy and kissed her fickled lips. Whenever he mixed paint, there was a part of him scientifically tuned into measuring and stirring up the perfect shade of lavender, while another part set sail while dreaming of the dreams that might be dreamt up within those lavender walls. Maybe anytime you got close enough to scratch down to a person’s insides, there was always a special feeling for lavender going on in there?
Don’t give her too much credit for liking flowers,
he warned himself.
Every girl likes flowers.
 

“Colors can work a spell on emotions, too,” Vassie said. Her fingers moved like dark magic wands over a row of mismatched china bowls. “I use tumeric for making yellow and dogwood for blue. Pokeweed makes a smokin’ shade of red. See all these sticks of weeping willow? They’re the secret behind my salmon-pink
Kiss Behind the Earlobes
.”

“I like colors,” Hadley said. 

She handed him a little pillow made of softest leather. “Smell this.”

Hadley’s head went dizzy with the spicy scent of jasmine. 

“A white woman from Long Street is paying me four dollars to make her a pair of pillows for the soles of her dancing shoes.” 

“I never smelled jasmine-flavored feet before.” 

She picked up a cotton handerchief. “I sell a shitload of these, too.” She waved the cheap fabric under his nose, and bergmot and lemon ran wild through his sinuses. 

Hadley could hardly contain himself. “This is wonderful, Vassie.”

“But you still haven’t had a sniff of Darratu yet.”

“Maybe I have, and maybe I haven’t. How would I know?”

Vassie’s eyes twinkled. “You wouldn’t. But I never wear the stuff to get a man. Wearing Darratu when you’re courting would be like telling someone you have a million bucks saved under your mattress: how would you ever know if a person liked you for yourself or for your riches?”

“Then why do you make it?”

“Because there are plenty of woman out there who don’t give a damn why a man likes them. They just wanna be liked.”

There were times in his own life when he might have been tempted to sprinkle the stuff all over himself. Had he owned a bottle of Darratu when Nina was a baby, he’d have bathed in cologne water every day. Maybe Lucinda would have left Dickie, and they could have been a real family. “What does Darratu mean?”

“
Blooming flower
. It’s Ethiopian. If you want to make something bloom, it’ll cost you seventy-five cents.”

“What’s in it?”

She shook her finger. “That is a secret I’ve never told anyone.” The violet bottle of Darratu went back in its place. “Let’s move along, shall we?” She uncapped a jar of tiny crystals and poured some in his hand. “Until you’ve taken a bath in Vassie’s
Sugar Soak,
you haven’t taken a bath.”

“I haven’t?”

“Tastes good, too.”

Hadley clapped the sparkles off his palm. “I think it’s time for dessert.”

It was dawn by the time he walked up Treebourne Street, and the pastel rays of early light made the nipple-pink wisteria look pinker and nipplier than they’d ever looked before. He thought he saw a bedroom curtain tremble behind the reflection of pink blossoms, and he got a sudden urge to wave. He hoped that Nina was hiding up there behind the lace, watching him through a lattice of diamond-shaped holes. He tugged at a vine and plunged his face into the cool, wet petals, confirming his theory that wisteria smelled softer and less intense before the heat of the day. Like a fresh pillowcase. Or a woman after a bath. 

When he looked up from the flowers, Nina’s curtains were still. But the red drapes in another bedroom slowly opened down the middle.

###

Andrew, Atticus, Anthone, Amber, and Armstrong had become obsessed with winning the Bloody Lime after Hadley made the mistake of showing it to them during a wicked game of ring taw. The A boys were vicious when it came to all games, and marbles was no exception. By now, Hadley had seen them in action and knew to be afraid. Vassie’s brood were known to take skin off the way they played tops, their goal being more to wound rather than out-spin an opponent. Similarly, football was just a good excuse to get the other players in a headlock. The twins, Anthone and Amber, seemed especially keen on murdering one another. Their method of choice was hockey. Apparently no one had ever told Anthone and Amber that you needed a puck to play. They preferred slapping around roller skates, food, or their father’s old tools, and it was just tough luck if you were the goalie. When the A boys made up their mind to go after the Bloody Lime, Hadley knew his goose was cooked. The only thing remotely in question was which A would win the marble.