Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger (7 page)

“Oh, I couldn’t possibly drive,” Dar says. “Lindsay?”

“Are you kidding? I’m not even sure I can walk.” Lindsay grabs Jeffrey’s shoulder for support.

Jeffrey looks around. Their rental car, a white Ford Escort, is the last one left in the parking lot. Somebody has already turned off the pink neon salute sign and all those little twinkling lights. The restaurant sits like a dark square box on the beach with the glistening sea stretched out beyond it,
as far as the eye can see.
This phrase just comes to Jeffrey. A little breeze comes up. And there they are, Jeffrey and Dar and Lindsay, all alone in the Salute parking lot, out in the breezy, starry night.

“Well, come on, then,” he says, pulling his mother’s hand.

In the middle, Jeffrey escorts the women back to the hotel, walking them all the way down Duval Street where he sees more sights than you can possibly imagine, weirder people than he has seen in the
National Enquirer
or the
Midnight Sun,
while sitting in the chair with Mrs. Hamster. Men dressed as women and women dressed as men and one woman wearing almost nothing at all except black boots and a studded dog collar around her neck with the leash trailing down along the sidewalk behind her. “Hi honey,” this one says. “Hi there,” says Jeffrey. An old man wearing a name tag throws up in an alley where six-toed cats forage (word) among the garbage cans.

Finally they reach their hotel and take the elevator up together, dropping Lindsay off at her room on the third floor. Luckily Jeffrey remembers their own room number, which Dar has forgotten. “I’m going to rest for just a minute,” she says, lying down on her double bed without even brushing her teeth. She falls asleep instantly, mouth open. She is heavily intoxicated (word), Jeffrey knows.

But he has never felt more awake in his life. He slides open the door of the balcony and goes outside to lean over the rail and look out over the shining water. The warm wind makes a clattering sound in the palm trees. It caresses Jeffrey’s face. He stands out there for a long time, he’s not even tired. A little curved moon like a comma (simile) rides in the sky among all those stars. “Hey Rick,” Jeffrey says, looking up.

“Hey Jeff,” Rick answers. His voice comes from nowhere and everywhere all at once, it fills the entire enchanted evening.
Knock, knock. — Who’s there? — Sam ‘n’ Janet. — Sam ‘n’ Janet who? — Sam ‘n’ Janet Evening.
Jeffrey will learn this joke later, from a book.

As soon as he gets back to Washington, he will go to the library and check out three joke books, and then three more, as many as they will loan him at a time. He will learn them all: knock-knock jokes, chicken jokes, lightbulb jokes, yo’ mama jokes. He practices telling them in front of the full-length mirror in the bathroom. He gets so he can tell them real fast, rat-a-tat-tat. He practices walking in funny ways. Dar begs him to stop, but he won’t. He signs up for the Moriarty Middle School Talent Show. He works up routines, trying them out on Dennis Levering, who cracks up, and the Hamsters, who titter and shake uncontrollably. But Dar can’t even watch. “Honey, this makes me so nervous,” she says. He
makes her buy him a shiny black suit and a red bow tie, which he will wear in the talent show, with his old Keds and his shirttails hanging out. Dar talks to his teacher. “You don’t have to do this,” she tells him right before the show. But just then the doorbell rings and it is Mr. Hamster, bringing Jeffrey an old felt hat. “Who in the world was that little man?” Dar asks, closing the door. Jeffrey tries the hat on in front of the hall mirror, bending the brim first this way, then that. The hat is perfect.
Showtime!

On the way into the auditorium, he sees Sean Robertson and Max Gruenwald and tells them a mean joke, meaner than they are.
Why did Helen Keller have a burn on the right side of her face? — She answered the iron. — Why did Helen Keller have a burn on the left side of her face? — They called back.
Sean and Max have white, startled, pimply faces. Jeffrey sweeps past them down the aisle to the front, where he is directed backstage into the greenroom. There are a dozen contestants. He goes on ninth, following Rob Acton’s band and Tiffany Bell doing acrobatics and Lydia Wang who is widely considered a child prodigy on the violin. Lydia wins, of course, but Jeffrey will take second place, and he is the one who will get a standing ovation and be hugged by the voluptuous Miss Hanratty to the envy of all as she smashes his face into her huge breasts so hard he sees stars in front of his eyes, a harbinger (word) of things to come.

Big Girl

H
ow did this happen?” the woman asks me so soft I have to lean up in the chair to hear. “When did it start?” A good question. But when does anything start? How far back do you have to go? I was a big girl, now I’m a big woman. My life has been different because of it. Many avenues of opportunity are closed off to a big girl. You can’t be a majorette, for instance. You can’t be a cheerleader. You dress and undress in the shower stall at gym class. You stand in the back for group pictures. If you ever get elected to anything, it’s always treasurer. I never had a date in high school. Boys didn’t even notice my big breasts because I was big all over, like the Pillsbury Doughboy, remember him? On the packages of pizza mix and cake mix? I have opened a number of those packages in my time, I might as well admit it. Obviously I’m not a picky eater. Everybody has to be something, I reckon, and I’m a great cook. I tell you that in all honesty. I’m known far and wide for my cakes, my three-cheese lasagna, my chicken and biscuits, and especially my chocolate pecan pie — Billy’s favorite.

Used to be
his favorite, I should say! During the first six years of our marriage, Billy gained forty pounds, which he complained about, but he didn’t really mean it. He needed to beef up some.
He looked better than ever, in my opinion. Maybe I should have paid more attention last spring when he went out and bought that diet stuff at the Whole Earth Store in the mall and said he was going to get back in shape, but I just thought, isn’t that nice? A man has got to do
something,
after all, even a man that has got hurt and laid off, and they say walking is good for anybody, though it makes me short of breath, personally. I worked overtime while Billy walked. He walked all summer long.

It never occurred to me to wonder if he had a destination.

“Mrs. Sims, when did you start doing this?” the woman asks again. Her name tag says “Lois Rubin.” She’s one of those skinny, flat-chested women who wear turtleshell glasses and pull their hair straight back with a barrette and go around writing on clipboards. She’s not from around here. I bet she grew up rich. She’s rich now, big square-cut diamond ring plus a nice chip-diamond wedding band on her left hand. She’s just another do-good rich lady down here at the jailhouse occupying herself while her surgeon husband screws a nurse. Oh Lord! Now where did
that
come from? As a big girl, I’m used to hanging back and not just saying whatever pops into my head, the way I keep doing ever since they brought me in here. I swear, I don’t know what has got into me!

Billy always said he was going to get me a diamond but he never did. Though he had the best intentions in the world, poor thing, I still believe this. But life can snatch you up and mess with you in many different ways. Sweet, sweet Billy Sims. None of this is
his
fault, you can count on that.

I take full responsibility for everything.

“Mrs. Sims. Dee Ann.” Lois Rubin looks down at her clipboard. “High school graduate, good grades, student government,
excellent work record in a number of positions. What happened to you?”

This is the same question asked earlier in the day by my preacher, Rev. Buford Long. Then he laid his hand on my forehead like Jesus and announced he has revved up the prayer chain for me. “Thanks but no thanks,” I said. “Get him out of here,” I told the deputy, who did it, grinning. This deputy’s name is Sam Hicks. Rev. Buford Long was just sputtering and spewing all the way out the door. “Now Dee Ann Sims, I know you are a good girl,” he said, working his neck like a chicken. “Why, you are one of my own! I know you don’t mean that.” He had on this powder blue suit. I knew his wife, Ruth, would be waiting outside in the car, just primed to get the story so she could spread it all over town. All she ever brings to church suppers is three-bean salad.

“Mrs. Sims, let’s go back to the beginning,” Lois Rubin says so soft her voice is like a voice in my own head. “How did this start?”

T
HE TRUTH IS THAT
most times, you don’t even know something has started until you’re right in the middle of it, and even then, you don’t necessarily recognize what it is. It creeps up on you, like weight.

You wouldn’t believe it to look at me now, but I started out as a beanpole. Then they sent Sissy and me to the mission school, where my job was to work in the kitchen. By the time I started working for Mrs. Hawthorne and switched over to regular school, I was about like I am now. I always felt like there was another girl, a little bird girl, trapped inside me. She is quick and fast. She dips and soars. She is everything I’m not. I walked around with her wings beating, beating, beating inside my chest to get out.

I was not a thing like my mama who was movie-star, drop-dead gorgeous, she looked like Elizabeth Taylor. I have a picture of her in my pocket book right now, which of course they have locked away someplace. I remember being with Mama one time on the street, in Knoxville, downtown, and a man came up and put his hand on her arm. “Who are you?” he said. “Who
are
you?” I don’t remember what she said or what happened after that, whether she went off with him or not. I do remember holding Sissy’s hand on the street. I always took good care of Sissy when Mama went off “seeking a better association” as she said. And I was glad for Sissy when she got adopted, though she won’t hardly give me the time of day now that she has married rich and lives in Boca Raton, Florida. I haven’t heard a word from her since last Christmas when we got a basket full of fruit and a card with a picture of their house on it and “Cecelia and Lyman Petersen” in fancy printing. It’s a big house too. Pink stucco with palm trees. And I don’t care for fruit.

Here’s something I’ve been thinking about ever since they caught me. It does seem like the more you do for somebody, the more they will turn on you in the end. Miss Manners said this once in the newspaper — if you act like a rug, somebody will walk on you. I’m coming to think this is true.

It seems like only yesterday that I used to braid Sissy’s hair the same way I braid my own Debbi’s hair now. Both of them the kind of little girls that you just naturally love to take care of. I hate to think that Billy’s sister Sue is taking care of Debbi right now. Sue will not know to lay down with her on the bed and sing Itsy Bitsy Spider and then say “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep” every night, or that Debbi has to have those little ponies lined up in a row on her pillow. Also I can’t stand to think
about Debbi breathing all of Sue’s passive smoke. But Lord knows, Sue owes me — she stayed with us between husbands when she was so nervous. I had to wait on her hand and foot.

I’ve always been the dependable one, like furniture, like chairs. Like a La-Z-Boy recliner, and I guess you might say Billy was the original La-Z-Boy himself. I don’t mean to say that he was lazy, Billy, I mean to say that things have not worked out as he planned. He couldn’t help getting his leg hurt, he couldn’t help it that Tennessee Power and Light laid him off, or that drinking is genetic in his family, and I know he didn’t mean all those ugly things he said to me either. Billy is sweet, sweet. And handsome — Lord! I never could believe he really married me in the first place, with all the girls he had to choose from. He had the whole county to choose from.

Many is the time that I have woke up in the middle of the night with my heart just pounding, to think of it! And then I’d look over at him laying on his back with his hands folded on his belly like a dead man and that little nasal strip over his nose, which he has to use for his sleep apnea, and I’d hear his snuffly breathing, and I’d think, I am the only one who ever sees Billy Sims with his nasal strip on. Then I’d think, Billy Sims is still here in the bed with
me
! After eight years of marriage! It must be a mistake. But it is not.

Was
not. It was not. I’d lay there and look at him for hours, listen to him breathing, watch him sleep.

For some reason this reminds me of one time when I was a kid and we were living in that old cabin way out in the woods and I woke up real early for no good reason and walked out on the porch, it was years ago and yet I can remember it like it was yesterday. Mama and Daddy were gone. It was early, early spring
and rainy, a little white mist in the trees, sarvis and dogwood in bloom. The cabin was so old that the silvery boards on the porch felt smooth and almost soft to my feet. I walked out real quiet, and there he was. A twelve-point buck standing like a statue just beyond the treeline. He stared straight at me. I stopped dead still and stared back. I felt like he had been watching for me, waiting for me to come out that door. It was like he knew me. And then Sissy called “Dee Ann?” in her little baby voice from inside, and I turned my head for one split second, and when I looked back he was gone. Gone without a trace. Yet I knew he had been there, and for days afterward I felt warm inside, and special, because of it.

I
DON’T KNOW WHY
I’m telling you all this. “Just go on,” Lois Rubin says.

I
WENT OFF TO
work every morning after the accident feeling this same way, feeling special, leaving Billy asleep in the bed behind me. He got his nights and days all turned around after he got hurt. First he couldn’t get to sleep for the pain, he couldn’t get comfortable in spite of the pills. Then he got to where he was sleeping all day and staying up all night long, he’d watch videos, and why not? Poor thing. It killed me to watch him hobbling around the kitchen like a hundred-year old-man with all those pins sticking out of his leg. He was drinking too. It broke my heart.