Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger (27 page)

Then “
Karen,
” she said in a pointed way that meant this was what she was
really
interested in, “do you have any idea where your sister is right now?”

“What?” I couldn’t even remember
who
my sister was, right now.

“
Ashley,
” Mama said. “The school called and asked if she was sick. Apparently she just never showed up at school today.”

“I’ll bet they had some secret senior thing,” I said.

“Oh.” Mama sounded relieved. “Well, maybe so. Now who is it you’re spending the night with?” she asked again, and I told her. “And what did you say her father does?”

“Lawyer,” I said.

S
PENDING THE NIGHT WITH
Tammy Lester was the high point of my whole life up to that time. She did
not
live in a trailer, as rumored, but in an old unpainted farmhouse with two boarded-up windows, settled unevenly onto cinder-block footings. A mangy dog lay up under the house. Chickens roamed the property. The porch sagged. Wispy ancient curtains blew out eerily
at the upstairs windows. The whole yard was strewn with parts of things — cars, stoves, bedsprings, unimaginable machine parts rusting among the weeds. I loved it. Tammy led me everywhere and showed me everything: her secret place, a tent of willows, down by the creek; the grave of her favorite dog, Buster, and the collar he had worn; an old chicken house that her brothers had helped her make into a playhouse; a haunted shack down the road; the old Packard out back that you could get in and pretend you were taking a trip. “Now we’re in Nevada,” Tammy said, shifting gears. “Now we’re in the Grand Canyon. Now we’re in the middle of the desert. It’s hot as hell out here, ain’t it?”

I agreed.

At suppertime, Tammy and I sat on folding chairs pulled up to the slick oilcloth-covered table beneath a bare hanging light-bulb. Her brothers had disappeared. Tammy seemed to be cooking our supper; she was heating up Dinty Moore stew straight out of the can.

“Where’s your daddy?” I asked.

“Oh, he’s out west on a pipeline,” she said, vastly unconcerned.

“Where’s your mama?” I said. I had seen her come in from work earlier that afternoon, a pudgy, pale redheaded woman who drove a light blue car that looked like it would soon join the others in the backyard.

“I reckon she’s reading her Bible,” Tammy said, as if this were a perfectly ordinary thing to be doing on a Friday night at gin-and-tonic time. “She’ll eat after while.”

Tammy put half of the Dinty Moore stew into a chipped red bowl and gave it to me. It was delicious, lots better than Lady Food. She ate hers right out of the saucepan. “Want to split a beer?” she said, and I said sure, and she got us one — a Pabst Blue
Ribbon — out of the icebox. Of course I had never tasted beer before. But I thought it was great.

That night, I told Tammy about my father’s nervous breakdown, and she told me that her oldest brother had gone to jail for stealing an outboard motor. She also told me about the lady down the road who had chopped off her husband’s hands with an ax while he was “laying up drunk.” I told her that I was pretty sure God had singled me out for a purpose He had not yet revealed, and Tammy nodded and said her mother had been singled out too. I sat right up in bed. “What do you mean?” I asked.

“Well, she’s real religious,” Tammy said, “which is why she don’t get along with Daddy too good.” I nodded. I had already figured out that Daddy must be the dark handsome one that all the children took after. “And she was a preacher’s daughter too, see, so she’s been doing it all her life.”

“Doing what?” I asked into the dark.

“Oh, talking in tongues of fire,” Tammy said matter-of-factly, and a total thrill crept over me, the way I had always wanted to feel. I had hit pay dirt at last.

“I used to get embarrassed, but now I don’t pay her much mind,” Tammy said.

“Listen,” I said sincerely. “I would give
anything
to have a mother like that.”

Tammy whistled derisively through the hole in her teeth.

But eventually, because I was already so good at collective bargaining, we struck a deal: I would get to go to church with Tammy and her mother, the very next Sunday if possible, and in return, I would take Tammy to the country club. (I could take her when Mama wasn’t there; I was allowed to sign for things.) Tammy and I stayed up talking nearly all night long. She was even more
fascinating than I’d thought. She had breasts, she knew how to drive a car, and she was part Cherokee. Toward morning, we cut our fingers with a kitchen knife and swore to be best friends forever.

The next day, her brother Buddy drove me into town at about one o’clock. He had to see a man about a car. He smoked cigarettes all the way, and scowled at everything. He didn’t say a word to me. I thought he was wonderful.

I arrived home just in time to intercept the delivery boy from the florist’s. “I’ll take those in,” I said, and pinched the card which said, “For Dee Rose. Get well soon. Best wishes from Lydia and Lou Applewhite.” I left the flowers on the doorstep, where they would create a little mystery later on, when Mama found them, and went upstairs to my room and prayed without ceasing, a prayer of thanksgiving for the special favors I felt He had granted me lately. Then before long I fell asleep, even as a huge argument raged all over the house, upstairs and down, between Mama and my sister Ashley who had
just come in,
having stayed out all day and all night long.

“If a girl loses her reputation, she has lost
everything,
” Mama said. “She has lost her Most Precious Possession.”

“So what? So what?” Ashley screamed. “All you care about is appearances. Who cares what I do, in this screwed-up family? Who really cares?”

It went on and on, while I melted down and down into my pink piqué comforter, hearing them but not really hearing them, dreaming instead of the lumpy sour bed out at Tammy’s farm, of the moonlight on the wispy graying curtains at her window, of a life so hard and flinty that it might erupt at any moment into tongues of fire.

N
OT ONLY WAS THE
fight over with by Sunday morning, but it was so far over with as not to have happened at all. I came in the kitchen late, to find Mama and Ashley still in their bathrobes, eating sticky buns and reading the funnies. It looked like nobody would be available to drive me to church. Clearly, both Ashley and Mama had Risen Above It All — Mama, to the extent that she was virtually levitating as the day wore on, hovering a few feet off the floor in her Sunday seersucker suit as she exhorted us all to hurry, hurry, hurry. Our reservations were for one o’clock. The whole family was going out for brunch at the country club.

Daddy was going too.

I still wonder what she said to him to get him up and dressed and out of there. I know it was the kind of thing that meant a lot to her — a public act, an event that meant
See, here is our whole happy family out together at the country club; see, we are a perfectly normal family; see, there is nothing wrong with us at all.
And I know that Daddy loved her.

Our table overlooked the first tee of the golf course. Our waiter, Louis, had known Daddy ever since he was a child. Daddy ordered a martini. Mama ordered a gin and tonic. Ashley ordered a lemon Coke. I ordered a lemonade. Mama was so vivacious that she almost gave off light. Her eyes sparkled, her hair shone, her red lipstick glistened. She and Ashley were discussing which schools her fellow seniors hoped to attend, and why. Ashley was very animated too. Watching them, I suddenly realized how much Ashley was like Mama. Ashley laughed and gestured with her pretty hands. I watched her carefully. I knew Mama thought Ashley had lost her Most Precious Possession (things were different
down there
), yet she didn’t look any different to me. She wore a hot pink sheath dress and pearls. She looked terrific.

I turned my attention to Daddy, curiously, because I felt all of a sudden that I had not really seen him for years and years. He might as well have been off on a pipeline, as far as I was concerned. Our drinks arrived, and Daddy sipped at his martini. He perked up. He looked weird, though. His eyes were sunken in his head, like the limestone caves above the Tombigbee River. His skin was as white and dry as a piece of Mama’s stationery. My father bought all his clothes in New York so they were always quite elegant, but now they hung on him like a coat rack. How much weight had he lost? Twenty pounds? Thirty? We ordered lunch. Daddy ordered another martini.

Now he was getting entirely too perky, he moved his hands too much as he explained to Ashley the theory behind some battle in some war. He stopped talking only long enough to stand up and shake hands with the friends who came by our table to speak to him, friends who had not seen him for months and months. He didn’t touch his food. Underneath my navy blue dress with the sailor collar, I was sweating, in spite of my mother’s pronouncement:
Horses sweat, men perspire, and women glow.

I could feel it trickling down my sides. I wondered if, as I grew up, this would become an uncontrollable problem, whether I would have to wear dress shields. We all ordered Baked Alaska, the chef’s specialty, for dessert. My mother smiled and smiled. I was invisible. When the Baked Alaska arrived, borne proudly to our table by Louis, nobody could put out the flames. Louis blew and blew. Other waiters ran over, beating at it with linen napkins. My mother laughed merrily. “For goodness’ sakes!” she said. My daddy looked stricken. Finally they got it out and we all ate some, except for Daddy.

Gazing past my family to the golfers out on the grass beyond
us, I had a sudden inspiration. I knew what to do. I emerged from invisibility long enough to say, “Hey, Daddy, let’s go out and putt,” and he put his napkin promptly on the table and stood right up. “Sure thing, honey,” he said, sounding for all the world like my own daddy. He smiled at me. I took his hand, remembering then who I had been before the nervous breakdown: Daddy’s little girl. We went down the stairs, past the snack bar, and out to the putting green at the side of the building.

My dad was a good golfer. I was not bad myself. We shared a putter from the Pro Shop. We started off and soon it was clear that we were having a great time, that this was a good idea. The country club loomed massively behind us. The emerald grass, clipped and even, stretched out on three sides in front of us, as far as we could see, ending finally in a stand of trees here, a rolling hill there. This expanse of grass, dotted with pastel golfers, was both comforting and exhilarating. It was a nine-hole putting green. On the seventh hole, we were tied, if you figured in the handicap that my father had given himself. I went first, overshooting on my second stroke, sinking it with a really long shot on my third. I looked back at Daddy to make sure he had seen my putt, but clearly he had not. He was staring out over the grass toward the horizon, beyond the hill.

“Your turn!” I called out briskly, tossing him the putter. What happened next was awful.

In one terrible second, my father turned to me, face slack, mouth agape, then fell to his knees on the putting green, cowering, hands over his face. The putter landed on the grass beside him. He was crying. I didn’t know what to do. I just stood there, and then suddenly the putting green was full of people — the pro, Bob White, in his jacket with his name on it, helping Daddy to
his feet; our dentist, Dr. Reap, holding him by the other elbow as they walked him to our white Cadillac, which Mama had driven around to pick us up in. Ashley cried all the way home. So did Daddy.

It was not until that day that I realized that the nervous breakdown was real, that Daddy was really sick.

I ran upstairs and prayed without ceasing for a solid hour, by the clock, that Daddy would get well and that we would all be
all right,
for I had come to realize somehow, during the course of that afternoon, that we might
not
be. We might never be all right again.

A
T LEAST
I
HAD
a New Best Friend. I banished all memory of Alice Field, without remorse. Tammy Lester and I became, for the rest of that spring, inseparable. The first time I brought her to my house, I did it without asking. I didn’t want to give Mama a chance to say no. And although we had not discussed it, Tammy showed up dressed more like a town girl than I had ever seen her — a plaid skirt, a white blouse, loafers, her dark hair pulled back and up into a cheerful ponytail. She could have been a cheerleader. She could have been a member of the Sub-Deb Club. No one could have ever guessed what she had in her pocket — a pack of Kents and a stolen kidney stone once removed from her neighbor, Mrs. Gillespie, who had kept it in a jar on her mantel. But even though Tammy looked so nice, Mama was giving her the third degree. “How many brothers and sisters did you say you had?” and “Where was your Mama
from
?”

This interrogation took place upstairs in Mama’s dressing room. Suddenly, to everyone’s surprise, Daddy lurched in to fill the doorway and say, “Leave those little girls alone, Dee Rose,
you’ve got your hands full already,” and oddly enough, Mama
did
leave us alone then. She didn’t say another word about it at the time, turning back to her nails, or even later, as spring progressed and Ashley’s increasing absences and moodiness became more of a problem. Before long, Daddy refused to join us even for dinner. Mama did have her hands full. If I could occupy myself, so much the better.

I will never forget the first time I was allowed to go to church with Tammy and her mother. I spent the night out at the farm, and in the morning I was awake long before it was time to leave. I dressed carefully, in the yellow dress and jacket Mama had ordered for me only a couple of months before from Rich’s in Atlanta. It was already getting too small. Tammy and her mother both looked at my outfit with some astonishment. They didn’t have any particular church clothes, it turned out. At least, they didn’t have any church clothes as fancy as these. Tammy wore a black dress that was much too old for her, clearly a hand-me-down from someplace, and her mother wore the same formless slacks and untucked shirt she always wore. I could never tell any of her clothes apart. For breakfast that morning we had Hi-Ho cakes, which we ate directly from their cellophane wrappers, and Dr Pepper. Then we went out and got into their old blue car, which threatened not to start.
Oh no!
I found myself suddenly, terribly upset. I realized then how very much I was dying to hear Tammy’s mother speak in tongues of fire, a notion that intrigued me more and more the better I got to know her, because usually she
didn’t speak at all.
Never! Her pale gray eyes were fixed on distance, the way my daddy’s had been that day on the golf course. The engine coughed and spluttered, died. Then finally Tammy’s mother suggested that Tammy and I should push her down the muddy rutted
driveway and she’d pop the clutch. I had never heard of such a thing. In my family, a man in a uniform, from a garage, came to start cars that wouldn’t start. Still, we pushed. It started. I got mud all over the bottom of my yellow dress.