News of the Spirit (7 page)

“Can I have one of those?” Sarah reaches for Gladiola’s pack of Salems.

Gladiola nods absently. “All I can say is that Sean Skeens went temporarily insane because she was over at Mountain Tech so long. Why, as soon as she pulled up in the road, he came busting out of that trailer hollering all this crazy stuff
about Roxanne going off in the car to see other men, and such as that, and then you won’t believe what he did next!”

“
What?
” The nicotine is making Sarah feel high, dizzy.

“He picks up this two-by-four that was laying right there, that they were fixing to build a deck with onto the trailer, see, they had them a big pile of treated lumber that they got on sale from Wal-Mart, and Sean’s brother was going to help them build the deck.”

Sarah leans back in the rocker and shuts her eyes. It crosses her mind that Gladiola is trying to drive her crazy. “Go on,” she says. She blows smoke in the air.

“Well, Sean Skeens proceeds to lay into that car something terrible. He busted ever window
clean out
, he was so mad, and then started in on the dash.”

Sarah sits bolt upright. “But that’s terrible! What did Roxanne do?”

Gladiola is putting things back into the refrigerator now. “I’m ashamed to own it,” she says, “but Roxanne picks up this
other
two-by-four and hits Sean Skeens right upside the head, just as hard as she can.”

“
Good heavens!
” Sarah is suddenly, horribly agitated. She feels like she has to go to the bathroom. Instead she reaches for another cigarette.

“Yes ma’am. Broke his nose and one cheekbone and some little bone right up here.” Gladiola points to her eyebrow. “I forget what you call it. Anyway, blood went all over the place, it was the biggest mess. Now they’ve got Sean Skeens
wired up till he can’t eat no solid food, he can’t have nothing but milk shakes. He’s still in the hospital. His mother has gone and charged Roxanne with assault and battery, and Roxanne has charged Sean with destruction of personal property. I tried to talk her out of it, I said, ‘You’ll have to pay that lawyer out of your own pocket,’ but you know how she is.”

“So what happened then?”

“Nothing yet. They’re all going to court next week.” Gladiola wipes off the kitchen counters and spreads her dishrag on the sink to dry.

“And the wedding is off?” Sarah feels an overwhelming sense of loss.

“You’re damn right!” Gladiola says. “They was too young to marry in the first place. Plus they was
too crazy
about each other, if you know what I mean. They would of wore each other out or killed each other, or killed somebody else. It wasn’t no way they could of stayed together.”

The front doorbell rings and Gladiola goes to answer it, leaving Sarah alone in the kitchen, where she rocks back and forth slightly, hugging herself. Sarah feels like she is hovering over her whole life in this rocking chair, she feels way high up, like a hummingbird. It occurs to her that the change of life might not be so bad.
No
change of life might be worse.

“What is it?” She struggles to her feet.

Everett Sharp has to repeat himself.

“I do hope I haven’t come at a bad time,” he says,
“although no time is
good
, in such a season of sorrow. I just wanted to thank you for your business and tell you I hope that everything met with your standards. I guess we probably do things different up here in the mountains….” Everett Sharp trails off, looking at her. He has to look
down
, he’s such a tall man; this makes Sarah feel small, a feeling she likes.

“
Sally Woodall
,” he says suddenly, with a catch in his voice. “Aren’t you Sally Woodall? From high school?”

And then Sarah realizes he didn’t know who she was at all, not really, he hadn’t even connected her with her teenage self of so many years before. Everett Sharp moves closer, staring at her. His long white bony arms poke out of his short white shirtsleeves; his forearms are covered with thick red hair. Sarah feels so hot and dizzy she’s afraid she might pass out.

“My wife died last year,” Everett Sharp says. “I married Betty Robinson, you might remember her. She was in the band.”

Sarah nods.

“Clarinet,” says Everett Sharp. Then he says, “Why don’t I take you out to dinner tonight? It might do you good to get out some. They’ve got a seafood buffet on Fridays now, at the Holiday Inn on the interstate.”

“All right,” Sarah says, but she can’t take in much of what happens after that. Everett Sharp soon leaves. It’s so hot. Gladiola leaves. It’s so hot. Sarah takes a notion to look for
her father’s vodka, which she finally finds in the filing cabinet in his study. She pours some into her iced tea and goes out on the porch, hoping for a breeze. She sits in the old glider and stares into the shady backyard, planning her outfit for tonight. Certainly not the beige linen suit she’s worn practically ever since she got here. Maybe the blue sheath with the bolero jacket, maybe the floral two-piece with the scoop neck and the flared skirt. Yes! And those red pumps she bought on sale at Montaldo’s last month and hasn’t even worn yet, it’s a good thing she just happened to throw them into her traveling bag. This strikes her as fortuitous, an omen. She sips her drink. The glider trembles on the edge of the afternoon.

Then Sarah remembers something that happened years ago, she couldn’t have been more than seven or eight. Oddly enough, she was sitting right here on this glider, watching her parents, who sat out on the curly wrought-iron chairs beneath the big tree drinking cocktails, as they did every evening. Sarah was the kind of little girl who sat quietly, and noticed things. Actually she spied on people. Her mama and her daddy were leaning forward, all dressed up.

Mama’s dress is white. It glows in the dark. Lightning bugs rise from the grass all around, katydids sing, frogs croak down by the creek. Sally has already had her supper. She wants to go back inside to play paper dolls, but something holds her there on the porch, still watching Mama and Daddy as they start to argue (jerky, scary movements, voices raised),
and then as they stand, and then as Daddy kicks over the table, moving toward Mama to kiss her long and hard in the humming dark. Daddy puts his hands on Mama’s dress.

The force of this memory sends Sarah back inside for another iced tea and vodka, and then she decides to count the napkins and place mats, and then she has another iced tea and vodka, and then she realizes it’s time to get ready for her dinner date, but before she’s through dressing she realizes she’d better go through the whole upstairs linen closet just to see what’s in there, so she’s not ready, not at all, not by a long shot, when Everett Sharp calls for her at seven, as he said.

He rings the front doorbell, then waits. He rings again. He doesn’t know!—he couldn’t even
imagine!
—that Sarah is right on the other side of the heavy door, not even a foot away from him, where she now sits propped up against it like a rag doll, her satin slip shining in the gloom of the dark hallway, with her fingers pressed over her mouth so she won’t laugh out loud to think how she’s fooled him, or start crying to think—as she will, again and again and again—how Sean must have felt when his very bones cracked and the red blood poured down the side of his face, or how
she
must have felt, hitting him.

In 1958, when my father had his famous affair with Carroll Byrd, I knew it before anybody. I don’t know how long he’d been having the affair before I found out about it—or, to be exact, before I realized it. Before it came over me. One day I was riding my bike all over town the way I always did, and the next day I was riding my bike all over town
knowing it
, and this knowledge gave an extra depth, a heightened dimension and color, to everything. Before, I’d been just any old thirteen-year-old girl on a bike. Now, I was a
girl whose father was having an affair
—a tragic girl, a dramatic girl. A girl with a burning secret. Everything was different.

All my conversations, especially my conversations with
my mother, became almost electrical, charged with hidden import: “pregnant with meaning,” in the lingo of the love magazines and movie magazines she was constantly reading. Well, okay,
we
were constantly reading. For my mother loved the lives of the stars above all else. She hated regular newspapers. She hated facts. She also hated club meetings, housework, politics, business, and her mother-in-law. She was not civic. She adored shopping, friends, cooking, gardening, dancing, children and babies and kittens (all little helpless things, actually), and my father. Especially she adored my father. Mama’s favorite word was “sweet.” She’d cry at the drop of a hat, and kept a clump of pink Kleenex tucked into her bosom at all times, just in case. She called people “poor souls.”

That spring, Elizabeth Taylor was the poorest soul around, when Mike Todd was killed in a plane crash one week before the Academy Awards. Elizabeth, clutching their tiny baby, Liza, was in shock as her Hollywood and New York friends rallied to her side. The industry had never seen such a dynamo as Todd, whose electric energy sparked everyone. Just a few weeks before Todd’s death, he had celebrated Elizabeth’s twenty-sixth birthday by giving her a dazzling diamond necklace at the Golden Globe Awards dinner.

Not a “poor soul” was Ava Gardner, who had divorced Frank Sinatra for the Italian actor Walter Chiari and now was trying to steal Shelley Winters’s husband, Anthony
Franciosa, playing opposite her in
The Naked Maja
, currently being filmed in Rome.

“Can you
imagine?
” My mother, clutching
Photoplay
, was outraged. “Isn’t Ava ever satisfied? Just think how Shelley Winters must feel!”

“It’s terrible,” I agreed.
If you only knew
, I thought. I sat down on the edge of the chaise longue to peer at the pictures of Ava and Shelley and Tony in a Roman nightclub.

“Look at that
dress
.” Mama pointed to Ava.

“What a bitch,” I said loyally.
If you only knew
, I thought.

“Honestly, Jenny, such language!” But Mama was giggling. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with you.”