To Come and Go Like Magic (21 page)

Myra drops us in front of the Rex. She thinks we’re going to Theater 2 to see
Planet of the Apes
, which is not brand-new either but newer than
Blowup
.

Lenny says I should try to look older.

“How do I do that?”

“Stand up straight,” he says. “Maybe tiptoe.”

We get the tickets easily because the ticket woman has her baby in the cage with her and it starts bawling about two seconds before Lenny steps up and asks for two tickets. She doesn’t even give me a glance.

We go in and sit in the dark beneath a huge rectangle of faint blue light. Lenny goes back out for Sugar Babies and Cokes and my eyes start to adjust. I see a few heads in front of us and to the sides. No kids, that’s for sure. Lenny said the college ordered this movie for their summer English classes to see. Otherwise, it would not be shown in this neck of the woods. That’s how Lenny put it. This only adds to the excitement. I straighten up so my head will be as high above the seat as all the others’.

First we get a
Roadrunner
cartoon and now previews for
The Sound of Music
, which was showing last summer and the summer before that. Myra brought me twice to see it.

“That’s the symbol for my life,” Lenny says, staring at the images sweeping across the big screen.

“What?” I ask. “What’s the symbol for your life?”

“Dancing,” he says. “My life, my momma’s life. Dancing is everything.”

Some people in front of us turn around in their seats and stare.

“If you just want to dance,” I whisper, “why did you sign up for the advanced classes next year?” Lenny’s having to read Shakespeare all summer and I can’t imagine that’s something he needs to know to be a dancer.

“Getting smart gives you a route,” Lenny says.

“A route?”

“A road to someplace,” Lenny says. “That’s what the counselor told me. She said I needed a challenge and a direction.”

I think about Miss Stone, our guidance counselor, sitting behind her desk with a fat folder full of test scores and making those little grunting sounds of disapproval that she has a habit of making.

“She tells everybody that,” I say.

“Well, maybe some people listen.”

Shhhh!
Heads whip around and give us mean looks as the blue lights above us start to dim.

The film is slow. A photographer takes pictures. A lot of pictures. Spends a long time developing them, looking at each photo from different angles, blowing them up.
And there are drugs and all sorts of bad behavior going on. And maybe a murder. But maybe not.

“See?” Lenny says when it’s over. “I told you.”

We walk outside into bright sunlight. I blink and look around for Myra.

“What?” I ask.

“I told you this was not a kid movie.”

“It was quite interesting,” I say, hoping he doesn’t ask me to explain anything about it.

“‘Quite interesting’?” Lenny laughs. “You don’t have a clue,” he says. “I didn’t understand half of it myself.”

“Was there really a murder?” I ask. “Could you really see that in the picture the man took?”

“Who knows,” says Lenny. “We should have seen the apes.”

“I saw it last year.”

“Yeah … me too.”

We sit on a park bench across from the theater and wait for Myra. She is thirty minutes late. Lenny takes out his wallet and opens the secret compartment behind the place for dollar bills and pulls out a photograph.

“Who’s that?”

“My mother,” he says. “That’s my mom.”

The picture is black-and-white, wrinkled down the center like it was folded at one time, and faded. The woman is wearing black short pants with a white blouse and a little
black jacket. Net stockings, high-heeled shoes, and a tall hat. She’s dancing on a stage somewhere, Lenny says, but you can’t really see the stage or the lights or the audience. You just know they’re there.

P
aradise …

I’ve come with Aunt Rose to the top of Mercy Hill Mountain and we’re sitting in the spot where the dining room of Grandma Sudie’s old house used to be. “The old home place” is what Rose calls it.

We’ve come up the mountain looking for goldenseal plants so Aunt Rose can make a salve to put on Uncle Lu’s arm where he scraped it on a barbed-wire fence, which caused it to turn all red and puffy.

“This’ll take out the infumation,” Rose says, holding up her bag of wild plants.

“Inflammation,” I correct her.

“Same thing.”

Rose is stubborn. She is not educated, but she has an answer for everything. Life learning is better than book learning, she claims.

This morning she packed pimiento-cheese sandwiches and Dr Peppers in a
brown
bag, so we’re having lunch in the sun.

“It used to be paradise here after a rainfall,” Rose says, holding out both arms like she’s reaching for the past.

“Paradise?”

“The roses,” she says, pointing to an old garden gone wild, one red rose plant climbing like a vine all the way to the top of a dogwood tree. “After a good rain they’d glisten in the sun,” she says. “Red, yellow, pink, white. Momma planted every color that spring.”

I take a bite of my sandwich and when I look back at Rose, she’s staring off into space, moving her mouth without making a sound.

“Are you praying, Aunt Rose?” She does this at the supper table when we start eating before the blessing.

“Nope,” she says. “I’m talking to Momma.”

“You’re talking to Grandma?” I want to laugh because I think maybe she’s joking, but then I see she’s not. She smiles, closes her eyes, and takes deep breaths like you have to take at the doctor’s office so he can listen to your lungs.

“Momma didn’t like the hard rain because it beat down her flowers,” Rose says, opening her eyes now and looking at me. “But I liked the way raindrops looked on the petals. Like tiny jewels.”

She holds out her bare hands, the nails dirty from collecting goldenseal, and tells me she used to dream of owning a real diamond ring.

It gets as still and quiet as a rock.

All of a sudden a big bird comes whooshing through the poplar trees. A hawk, maybe. Looking for baby rabbits or striped chipmunks. Aunt Rose doesn’t even notice; she’s still looking down at her hands. I need to bring her back to the old garden, make her smile.

“I’ll bet the roses were pretty back then,” I say.

“I remember the day Momma planted them,” Rose says. “But I wish I could remember how she looked.”

“How she looked?”

“I can see her working out there as plain as if it was yesterday, but I can’t see the look on her face.”

The rose garden has been taken over with briars, all the colors swallowed up by the dying summer grasses. Sun-dried silk from the milkweed floats in the air with the dragonflies, drifting above the lost flowers like messages on the wind.

“Tell her I’m here, too,” I say.

“What?” Aunt Rose looks at me like I’ve opened the door to her hiding place.

“Tell Grandma there’s no rain today. Tell her the sunlight’s everywhere.”

M
ean Streaks …

Mayme Murphy bangs on the front door. I run down the stairs as quick as I can so she doesn’t wake up Myra and Uncle Lu. Momma and Pop have gone to work, Jack’s out running, and Lenny’s in the backyard studying ants. It’s almost ten o’clock.

“Where’s Myra?” Mayme says when I open the door. She looks around me and up the stairs.

“In bed,” I say.

“Get her up,” Mayme says.

“Why?”

“Just get her up!” Mayme pushes her way into the house and stands in the living room wringing her hands. “Well?” She looks hard at me. “Go on!”

I don’t like it one bit when somebody outside the family tries to tell me what to do, especially Mayme. She always bosses Ginny around. But there’s something big in the air this morning. I can feel it. I stomp up the stairs, mostly to irritate Mayme but also to let Myra know I’m coming.

Myra drags her big belly out of bed and slips on her floppy pink house shoes and the robe that won’t button anymore.

“I’ve got to wash my face,” she says, and heads for the bathroom.

“No you don’t!” Mayme calls up from the foot of the stairs. “You need to come down here right now.”

Myra holds the railing and clumps down the stairs and I stay right on her heels. I wouldn’t miss this for the world.

“What’s wrong?” Myra asks when we get to the bottom.

“Let’s go in the kitchen,” Mayme says, acting like she’s in charge of the morning.

Myra sits at the table and Mayme goes over and pours the leftover coffee in two mugs just like she’s at home.

“Chileda, you need to go out back and play,” she says.

“Play? I don’t play.”

Mayme looks at Myra and Myra lowers her eyebrows at me, so I get up and go out back, but I leave the door open so I can hear.

Lenny comes around the house with his ant book and magnifying glass and I tell him to be quiet and sit down. We listen to Mayme pace back and forth. Stomp, stomp, stomp. Like she’s holding the news inside until the last second.

“Jerry Wilson is alive!” she says at last. “He’s living in Myrtle Beach.”

We hear Myra gasp.

Mayme says that Eva Lou Perkins, Myra’s doctor’s nurse, saw him with her own eyes. She went over to Myrtle Beach with two girlfriends last week and rented a room in the Holiday Inn. They got good tans, Mayme says, and ate funnel cakes every day and rode the biggest Ferris wheel you can imagine. She keeps on and on about Eva Lou’s vacation until Myra screams at her to stop.

“It can’t be him,” Myra says.

“They talked to him,” says Mayme. “And he was with a woman, a black-haired woman.” Mayme says they were hugging up together right on the boardwalk in front of everybody and that this was one of the prettiest women Eva Lou had ever seen.

Myra starts crying.

“You’re pretty, too, sweetheart,” Mayme says. She tries to sound like she didn’t mean to tell Myra about this woman’s beauty, but, of course, that was the main thing on her mind when she stepped in the door. Ginny’s like that, too. Mean streaks run in that family. That’s what Aunt Rose says. She knows all the women relatives back to Ginny’s grandma.

Mayme tells Myra that everybody in town knows about Jerry.

Lenny laughs out loud. “Of course they do—with somebody like her to blab it,” he says.

All of a sudden we hear Mayme come stomping
down the hallway. She slams the big door to the porch so we can’t hear.

We sit for a long time listening to the birds and cicadas singing.

T
rees …

I ask Lenny to name as many trees as he can, and he thinks on it for a minute and comes up with twenty-two, including fruit trees. He doesn’t name any of the trees I’ve seen in Miss Matlock’s books about the Amazon rain forest. They’re my favorites.

“Do you know what a cecropia tree is?” I ask.

Lenny shakes his head.

“Acacia?”

Lenny says no.

I mention alder and fig and mangrove, but Lenny isn’t sure about any of these trees. I tingle at the thought that I finally know more about something than Lenny does.

“Maybe fig,” he says. “Fig I’ve seen.”

At suppertime Lenny brings a tree book to the table. He’s checked it out of the library.