Authors: Sena Jeter Naslund
Four Spirits (23 page)
When the lights were on, Miss Smith said, “It is possible in this day and age, in your lifetime, Edmund Powers and all of you, for a Negro to become president of the United States!”
That was a hard time, the fall of 1963, but even while terrible things were happening and families were shattered, children were getting jobs, gifted with new shoes, sent to school, and getting inspiration and ambition from their teachers.
THE JIGGLING OF THE BED WAS WAKING STELLA.
The jiggling came into her consciousness from a distance, the way a horse rides toward the movie camera in a romantic western. The hoofbeats grew louder and louder till they were upon her, and she woke up.
But she was lying in her bed, and the room was full of moonlight. She glanced up over the headboard and there was a three-quarters moon gleaming like a shield. She had forgotten to pull the shade and close the curtains, the way her aunt always instructed.
The house and the night were absolutely still. No, an airplane was flying low over Norwood, headed for the airport.
During the summer, several times a week, she and Darl had walked over to the highest hill on Norwood Boulevard, only a couple of blocks away. They sat with their backs against the largest oak tree on the highest hill, and hugged and kissed for hours. Sometimes when a plane flew over large and low, it seemed just above their tree. Each window of the plane was clearly outlined, and Stella knew that on the other side of the line of portholes were rows of people in upholstered seats. Those travelers had no idea that she and Darl existed, that just below, for an instant, she and Darl were lying on the grass in a rapture of pleasure.
But the plane was passing over her bed now; it couldn't have awakened her.
She inspected the roomâdresser with its bench and winged, three-way mirror, the highboy. How still the furniture seemed. The room had only three pieces of furniture in it. When Stella studied, she worked at the dining room
table. Without moving, she glanced at the closet door, and it was closed and still, standing white and tall in the moonlight.
Then what had moved?
Stella became aware of her hand placed low between her thighs. She stirred against her hand. Yes, she had been rubbing herself. She had been masturbating. Stella smiled. She became a froth, a foam of amusement.
She had read that shocking word in one of her college psychology texts. Despite myths, the book said, masturbation did absolutely no damage of any kind, mentally or physically. Myths? No one had ever mentioned masturbation to her, let alone myths about it. Now she knew what it was. She giggledâshe tried so hard to be
good;
in sleep her unconscious had tried to relieve her need. So much kissing and hugging, all summer. Then fall weather had set in, and they really didn't have a place to go.
Last night, with warm jackets on, she and Darl had walked to their giant oak on the boulevard, but the ground was too damp and chilly for sitting. All the leaves had fallen, and the bare branches stretched bleakly into the night sky.
They resolved to stay only till a plane had flown over. She stood with her back against the rough oak bark, and Darl pressed against her, kissing and kissing. When they heard the plane approaching, Darl flung himself flat on his back on the cold ground, spread his arms out in crucifix fashion, and said, “Raped by a jet plane!” All lit up, the plane roared over them.
Shocked at Darl's exclamation, Stella had just stood there staring down at him. Had she ever heard anyone say the word
rape
out loud? Then she thought of Professor Andrew Gainey, at the college, singing the rape song from
The Fantasticks
at the top of his lungs. It hadn't meant
rape
at all; it had meant
sex.
With his resonant, confident, gleeful voice, he was letting sex out of the bank vault and into the world. Beautiful.
Stella moved her hand from her crotch and touched her engagement ring. Such a sweet circle, topped with its little diamond. A diamond like a clear seed. Aunt Krit didn't accept Darl as her fiancé. “I don't believe you love
him,”
Krit had said. “When you set the wedding date, then I'll believe it.”
Stella had asked, “Why don't you believe I'll marry Darl? I have a ring.”
“I just know,” her aunt said. “He's not right for you. I believe we might be distant kin to his family.” But she never offered a shred of evidence.
From her bed, Aunt Pratt called, “No, we're not.”
“He's no Prince Philip,” Aunt Krit replied from the kitchen. That was it; she
didn't think anybody but a prince might be good enough for
her
niece. “He's not Prince Rainier.”
The aunts never disagreed face-to-face, but in their trans-room differences, Stella always rooted for Aunt Pratt.
Stella held up the ring to let the moonlight kiss it.
So, she'd been masturbating so hard, she'd jiggled the bed. She'd awakened herself. She laughed out loud, but quietly.
What kind of repressed southern lady coward are you?
Consciously, she placed the palm of her hand over her nightgown and rubbed. Nothing happened. That was fine. She smiled at herself again and made a vow to do just as she pleased with her body. But not to tell. Well, she could probably tell Nancy; they always confided in each other.
She hadn't told Darl but tomorrow after school and before work at Fielding's, she was going to the gynecologist. At the doctor's, she would get a prescription for birth control pills, and then she and Darl could do what they wanted. She wasn't as stupid as she looked standing against the oak tree on the boulevard: he had needs, and so, it turned out, did she.
Sexual
needs.
But Old Maid Aunt Krit was right that they hadn't set any wedding date yet.
Stella held her hand up in the moonlight and spread her fingers, as though she would seine the light. She looked at the opposite wall to see if the moonlight was strong enough to cast a shadow. It wasn't. The light was diffuse. The whole room was luminous; the dresser and the closet door, her hand, all were equally magical.
Quietly, she slid down from the high bed and sat on the bench before the three-way mirror. She wanted to see her face in moonlight. There she was. It was as though she were walking through the woods, came to a still pond, and looked down to see her own face. Here she was in a quiet room, a virgin fair in an enchanted world.
Tomorrow, November 22, would be an important day: she would get birth control pills, and a new world would open to her. But the store was open of course Friday nightâa pre-Thanksgiving saleâand she'd have to go to work the switchboard, the same as every Friday night.
“FIX MY COFFEE,” RYDER JONES SAID TO HIS WIFE.
“All right, hon,” Lee answered.
While she opened the door on the pantry cabinet, she glanced at her husband, who was working at the kitchen table. Ryder was as absorbed with his wires and clocks as son Bobby making a model airplane. Friday was Ryder's half-day off this month, and he was wasting the afternoon as usual. Up on the cabinet shelf beside the Maxwell Instant, she noticed the cylindrical cardboard box of Morton's salt.
Stealthily, Lee dumped the sugar out of the sugar bowl and into a cracked cup and hid the cup on a high shelf. She took the salt down, lifted up the metal spout in the lid. As the metal shunt came up, the cardboard creaked a little, but Ryder didn't glance her way.
Lee'd always admired how neatly made a salt box wasâa sturdy cylinder completely closed, except for that one little snout of a spout, the box wrapped round with a nice navy blue label. Like it was dressed up to go out. The box never got out of working order either. She poured the salt into the sugar bowl.
Ryder was still absorbed in reading his bomb directions. She turned and flicked on the gas under the one-quart white enamel pot. She used that pot just to boil water, and it had tan mineral deposits on the inside. Lee had asked Ryder couldn't she have a little kettle for the stove, but he'd said there wasn't any need. Around the top of the white enamel pot ran a line of red trim, bright and nice, except where she'd banged it once and there was a black chipped place.
Ryder was reading the directions one of his Klan buddies had printed down for him. Handwriting like a second grader, Lee thought. It had occurred to her that since she had children of different ages, she could figure out at exactly what age each of his Klan buddies had stopped growing up. Ryder himself was about ten, same as Bobby, but Bobby was still growing. Some of the Klan were more like six or seven.
Suddenly she said to Ryder, “You know sometimes I wonder if the kids might be better off brought up Catholic.”
“Catholic!” he yelled and banged the table with his fist. His soldering iron leapt onto the floor. “Now look what you made me do!”
She'd wanted to rile him, and she had. She was bored. He ought to pay more attention to her. Take her out to a movie. At least talk to her, not sit there playing like a child. “Well I was just thinking about it,” she said, completely unruffled.
He responded to her ease with his own good humor. “Kennedy works for the pope.”
She said nothing. Kennedy was the only politician who wasn't a complete bore, and that was just because he was good-looking. Ryder picked up his iron and inspected the tip for damage.
“That's one thought you'd better put out of your head, girl,” Ryder said. “Catholics aren't real Americans.”
She nodded at the mess of buckets and bobbers on the table. “I don't think they'll want any more bombs now for a long, long time,” she said.
“You don't know nothing about it.” The tide of scorn began to rise in his tone.
“How come you don't already know how to make it, if you done what you said you done?”
“There's different types.”
“How'd you do the other?”
“It wasn't easy.”
“I can smell Bobby's airplane glue all the way in here from the living room,” she said.
“Yeah.” He fell silent.
Lee wandered into the front room. The two little ones were playing Go Fish on the floor, proud that they knew their numbers well enough to compete. But it was Bobby she was proud of. He was 100 percent pure boy with a
shock of hair on his forehead; she loved the way he was focused on making his model. Bobby was gluing the little gas tank onto the end of a fighter wing. He didn't even know she'd come into the room. She'd let him stay home with a cold.
Ryder ought to be proud of his kids, she thought. She imagined her children crossing themselves like Catholics did in the movies and thought how sweet and pious Bobby, Shirley, and Tommy would look. She'd known some Italian Catholics growing up. They were the same as anybody. Maybe happier, with their big families and huge dishes of spaghetti.
“Water's boiling,” Ryder called.
“You know what, Ryder?” she said, reentering the kitchen. “I think it's nothing but ignorance to be down on Catholics.”
“I don't want to ever hear you say that again.” He sounded tense.
“Well what'd they do?” She selected a cracked cup for Ryder on purpose. “They didn't crucify Jesus.”
“Hurry up, will you? You're slow as Christmas.”
“Well, what'd they do?” She set the coffee and the sugar bowl and a spoon down in front of Ryder. “You fix the sugar to suit.”
She watched him spoon the crystals into his cup, two teaspoonfuls. He stirred it to help it cool.
“Back in the 1920s, we had to shoot that Father Coyle.”
She laughed. “You wasn't even alive back in the 1920s. How could you shoot anybody?”
“The Klan. It was a Methodist minister Klan member kilt him.”
“I just don't believe that.”
“That Father Coyle married the Methodist minister's daughter to a Mexican, and he was Catholic. He shot him on the porch of the priest house.”
“I never read any Alabama history about that.”
“It's not all in books, Lee. But people know, and we hand it down, from generation to generation.” He sipped his coffee and yelled, “God-damn son of a bitch! What'd you put in my coffee?”
She smiled prettily, shrugged her shoulders, and said, “Same old coffee.”
He licked his finger and stuck it in the sugar bowl, then in his mouth. “This here is salt!”
She licked her finger and tasted, mimicking him. “Why, I believe you're right.” She was in a fine mood.
Springing out of his chair, Ryder dashed the contents of the coffee cup into the sink. He banged the cup on the drain board, and it broke in two, right along a crack line.
“Don't break up the dishes, hon,” she said.
“Don't you stand there like an idiot with your finger stuck in your mouth. I asked you for some coffee.”
“Well, I'll just have to start over.” She turned her back to him, but she heard him fling open the cabinet doors.
“Where's the gol-durned sugar!” He was scanning the high shelves.
“I'll look, honey. You just sit down and figure on your bomb.”
“Here it is!” he announced. “Somebody poured it out of the bowl and into this cup. You do that, Lee?”
“Now why'd I'd gone and did a silly thing like that, Mr. Ryder Jones?”
He sprang at her and slapped her finger out of her mouth.
“Mr. Tough Guy,” she taunted.
He grabbed her hand and twisted her arm behind her back. “You better tell me the truth, woman, or I'm gonna teach you.”
“Teach me what?” He wasn't hurting her much. “You're just making a tempest out of a teapot.”
When Ryder jerked her hand up, hard, a switch flipped inside her. Something familiar and intense was beginning, though it was only afternoon.
“That hurts!” she said. “Stop it!” A current of fear like a thrill went through her. But suddenly there was Bobby standing in the doorway.
“Dad,” he said, “whatcha doing to Mama?” He seemed scared but brave.
“Oh, Bobby,” she said, “we were just playing.” He looked small, just a little boy.
He brushed his forelock away from his eyes. “You said it hurts. Just now you said âThat hurts!' ” All innocence, he was just asking a question. He had a cold in his nose.
Ryder said threateningly, “Go back in the living room, son.”
Ryder was hurting her worse, but she wouldn't let on in front of Bobby. She just said to her son, “Please, Bobby, go on.”
After the boy turned to go, the phone rang, and Ryder hurried to answer it. Then Ryder pivoted Lee around in front of him and slapped her hard across the face. “I got to go in to work,” he said.
Then the doorbell rang, and everything sped up. While her head swiveled,
she could see Bobby standing at the front door, talking to Bob Chambliss, then calling back to the kitchen, “Daddy, daddy, come quick. Mr. Chambliss says they shot the president.”
Ryder ran through the houseâ“Hot dog!”âout the screen doorâ“No lie?”âand down the steps with his friend.
“I'm going, too,” Bobby shouted back at her and ran after the men.
Unperturbed, Shirley slapped down a two of spades on the bare floor.
“What's happened?” her little brother asked.
“I dunno. Somebody got shot.”