There he sat, in the passenger seat of his great-grandmother's car, the end product of all this random
genius
, ready to defend his territory at any cost.
“I'm going to send you a book about a man named Oedipus,” I said. “It will explain the psychological ramifications of this problem. Call me up when you've read it and we'll talk about it.”
“I don't know what any of that means.” He raised his head and looked at me. Gave me the full force of his gaze. He's an intuitive too. Nothing gets past him. There is no barrier between him and the world. Not a membrane to separate him from all that burgeoning wonder, all the glorious and inglorious knowledge of our being.
“I will love you till I die,” I said. “I love you more than anyone. You are the dearest thing on earth to me.”
“Let's go back to the party.”
“We better,” his mother added. “I have to see about the little girls.”
The day wore on into evening. The little girls went off to spend the night with cousins. My ex-daughter-in-law and her boyfriend went off to party with my nieces.
I took my grandson to the mall. We bought some baseball shirts and a pair of striped shorts. We ate some junk food. We held hands and walked around and looked at things. He is five foot five inches tall now. As tall as I am. Soon it will be over, this part of it. The part when he was a child and I was his guardian angel. He will leave me and go off to the world. He will leave me here with memories of many days in many malls, of buying transformers and Lego sets and books and basketball shoes and posters of Jose Canseco. Baseball hats and tacos and pizza and frozen yogurt. Goofy golf and batting cages and long walks and bike rides and swimming pools. We have heard the chimes at bedtime, oh, the malls that we have seen.
“I love you,” I kept telling him. “It's okay if your mother has a boyfriend. It will make her stronger. Anything that makes her stronger, makes you stronger. We are a family. We stick together.”
“I wish you lived where I do. I wish you lived next door.”
“I wish I did too. I hate to miss a day of seeing you.”
After a while the mall began to close and we walked out into the parking lot and watched the black teenagers forming into groups. I held his hand and let him find the car for me.
We went over to my momma's house and slept in my old bed. We snuggled down into the sheets from London. I pulled his fine strong eleven-and-a-half-year-old body into my arms and held him there. “You are my angel,” I said. “No one will ever take your place with me. Your mother and I love you more than you will ever know. No one will ever take her or me away from you.”
“I don't think so,” he said. I found his hand and held it. It is still the same size as mine. Delicate, with long thin fingers like his mother's. He is the catcher on his baseball team, the goalie at soccer. Always the dirtiest, hardest job in any sport. Because he can be depended upon.
“Go to sleep,” I said. “Tomorrow's Easter. Grandmother dyed eggs for us to hide.”
In the morning everyone reconvened in my mother's yard to hide Easter eggs and take photographs of each other. It was about evenly divided, between children who had been to Sunday School and the children of apostates.
The boyfriend moved among the children being charming. “My father is taller than you are,” I heard the six-year-old girl tell him.
“No, he's not,” I said. “Edward is taller than your father.” He raised his eyebrows just an almost imperceptible amount and sighed, and seemed to thank me.
“Why did you introduce him to the children?” I asked my ex-daughter-in-law. “Why did you even let him meet them?”
“He asked to. I put it off as long as I could. Well, it's done now. Let's get this Easter egg hunt over and I'll take him home.”
“This was a stupid idea. I shouldn't have talked you into coming. It was nuts. Coming up here into your ex-husband's family. Mother acting like the high priestess of a cult. The shrine of the double standard. My family in Jackson, Mississippi.”
“It's okay. I know what I want. I won't let this stop me.”
“Good. I'm glad to hear it.” I hugged her to my side. This woman six inches taller than me who is the only daughter I have ever had, who has never let me down or disappointed me. This giver of grandchildren, whom I worship.
An hour later they drove away. The boyfriend driving. My ex-daughter-in-law riding shotgun with the six-year-old beside her. The older children on the backseat with their Walkmans plugged into their ears. “Thank goodness that is over,” my mother said.
“What a mean thing to say,” I said. “I'm pulling for her. I want her to be happy.”
“He's too young,” my mother said. “It's embarrassing.”
Five days later I was in the kitchen of my house, leaning on a counter, hearing the fallout on the phone. “The boyfriend's gone,” my ex-daughter-in-law is saying. “They scared him off.”
“I'm sorry. It's my fault. I shouldn't have asked you to come.”
“It had to happen. I'm a group of people. I'm four of us.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“No.”
“Is there something I can do?”
“I don't think so. I guess I have to ride it out.”
“Fuck love. Fuck having lovers.”
“Come on, Rhoda. It's not that bad. I had a good time for a while.”
“Next time keep him to yourself. Don't even tell him you have kids. Don't tell me.”
“I've had enough to last me for a while.”
We hung up and I went out into my garden and started to water the hostas and the lilies. I pulled the garden hose around the hickory tree and started to turn it on. Then I changed my mind. To hell with nature. Let it take care of itself I spotted a wasps' nest under the eaves by the garage. I went into the house and got a can of flying insect spray and sprayed it good. I doused it and then I sprayed some on a spider's web.
If I had been one of my grandfathers I would have gone out to the stables and saddled a horse and put a bit in its mouth and gone riding with my dogs at my heels. Instead, I went into the house and put on my running shoes and started out around the mountain. I don't have any German-Jewish or American Indian or Dutch genes. I'm a Celt. I pile up stones and keep a loaded pistol in my underwear drawer. My ancestors painted themselves blue and impaled each other on oak staves. I can't stand tyranny. From the world outside or the tyranny of the heart. How can I help anyone? I can't even help myself. I was GLAD HE HAD WON. GLAD NO ONE COULD TAKE HIS MOTHER FROM HIM. GLAD HE KNEW HOW TO KEEP HER.
Even as I suffered for her I was glad no man would be in the house with those little girls, not any man, not the sweetest man in the world, in this chaotic world, vale of sorrows, vale of tears.
Too Much Rain, or, The Assault of the Mold Spores
T
HE SPRING Miss Crystal got her allergies was no joke. Creating jobs, Mr. Manny called it, and it did turn out to be quite an industry. By the time her nose quit running and she could talk again, there were fifteen different carpenters, four painters, two attic men, and half the teenagers in the neighborhood who knew the combinations to every door in the house. Two, two, four, two, three, is the front door combination in case there is anyone left in New Orleans who doesn't know it yet. There is nothing left in this house to steal anyway as Miss Crystal has turned out to be allergic to house dust as well as to mold spores and she is not taking any chances on any accumulating on any bric-a-brac. The allergy doctor showed Miss Crystal a blown-up photograph of a dust mite and that was the end of every book and statue and flower vase and piece of antique furniture in this house. We have gone completely modern for our interior with everything painted white and some new chairs by Mr. Mies van der Rohe who does not believe in chairs having arms on them. Also we have pulled up the carpets and put in black and white tiles that show every smudge and heel print and require a pair of floor cleaners coming in every Friday to vacuum and buff.
So much for the house. It was Miss Crystal's body that was the real battlefield. She even insisted that I go down and be tested even though I have never been allergic to anything in my life and wasn't showing any signs. Still, she pled and pled and finally I went on down and let them test me. They put sixty holes in your back and then you wait in this freezing cold room for twenty minutes and then they come back in to see if any of the holes have started itching or turning red. Then they put sixty more on your right arm with stronger chemicals in them and if that doesn't get a reaction they put sixty on your left arm. They were just debating whether to put a fourth set on my leg when I called a halt. Only one of all the holes had turned red and it was to a plant that grows up in Minnesota where I am not planning on going anytime soon and besides, I had to lead a youth group at four and it was growing late.
Another note. There was this nurse in white giving allergy shots to little children. The whole time I was waiting to be tested I had to watch that going on. She was standing in the hall with this tray full of dirty little bottles of different sorts of things people are allergic to. Ragweed, maple pollen, cedar dust, geraniums, and so forth. Each little child would come up and stick their arm out and she would dip a needle down into two or three of the jars, never watching what she was doing, just chatting with the parents and jabbing the needle in and out of the jar necks. Then she'd grab the child's arm and stick the needle in. I have never seen a nurse I trusted less. I wouldn't take those shots for anything in the world from that woman and I told Miss Crystal so. If you take them, I warned, demand another nurse.
The first thing the allergy doctor tried on Miss Crystal was having her stay in the house and putting her on some nose spray and a drug called Seldane that dries you up without putting you to sleep. I'd stick with Benadryl, I told her. You know you have strange reactions to prescription drugs. I have to take it, she replied. I have to put my faith in someone, so I have picked out Doctor Allensby.
So she began to take these Seldane tablets twice a day, once every twelve hours, and things picked up. Not only had her doctor recommended them but they were also recommended by a medical book we bought recently. Three days go by and all is going well. She is even able to go out in the yard to oversee the gardener.
The third afternoon she went down to the video store to get Crystal Anne a video and the girl in the store started talking to her about allergies and how everyone is getting them now and isn't it strange that it happened right when the pollution is getting worse and don't tell her it is only plants and trees making people in the United States get sick.
“I've got mine under control,” Miss Crystal says. “I'm taking this new drug called Seldane. It's great. It makes you kind of hyper but I can stand it. It's better than not breathing.”
“Oh, my God,” the girl says. “My brother and I took that last year. It made us have terrible dreams. Very, very lifelike dreams.”
“What did you say?” Miss Crystal says. “What did you just say?” It turns out she had been having terrible dreams for three nights but had not put the two things together. In the worst dream she and I are standing in a parking lot watching Mr. Manny drive the Lexus off the top of a cliff with the baby in the backseat. Mr. Manny is Miss Crystal's baby-faced and excessively brilliant husband. They have a mixed marriage which is doing better after many trials and tribulations. They met at a party in Pass Christian during the third day of the Six-Day War, when Miss Crystal was in her pro-Israeli syndrome and while Mr. Manny was obsessed with blonde Christian women, due to his having been sent to New England to school when he was thirteen years old. All of this came out in therapy. So they forged this troubled marriage out of these materials and they have this precious little girl, Crystal Anne, who is one of the two mainstays of my life. The other is my niece, Andria, who is at LSU leading the anti-establishment crusade. I have never been able to have a child of my own and for many years now I have seen that as a blessing in disguise. You get your heart tied up in children and you lose all sense of how to care for them and teach them to be strong. But back to Miss Crystal's dream.
The Lexus falls on its nose as we watch in terror and disbelief. Then a voice comes from the car. It is Mr. Manny's voice and he says everything is all right. He gets out of the car and then he reaches in the backseat and brings out the baby. They are both all right although they were not wearing seat belts. I think this dream is only a justification for Miss Crystal and Miss Lydia refusing to wear seat belts when they are together. Miss Lydia is Miss Crystal's best friend. She is a famous painter out in California who gets up to seventeen thousand dollars for every painting that she paints. Still, she and Miss Crystal are bad to act like adolescents when they get together. Many of their worst habits are on the wane now but they still like to ride around New Orleans with no seat belts. They say it is to prove there is no security, but I think it is more about not messing up their dresses when they are going out.
But back to the medical problems. You cannot win at this allergy game. Once your body goes autoimmune on you it is just one long trip to the doctor or the drugstore. Meanwhile, every tree and plant in New Orleans was bursting with blooms. Putting out pollen morning, noon, and night. “I am no longer part of the beauty of the world,” Miss Crystal cried out at least once a day. “Now I have to hate the things I used to love so dearly.”
“You never did pay much attention to flowers,” I consoled her. “You'd rather be on the tennis court any day.”
“I can't even play tennis with this going on,” she answered. “I can see the pollen falling from the trees. The more I breathe, the more Seldane I have to take.”
Here's what Mr. Manny decided we should do. All go to Florida and stay a few weeks and if Miss Crystal gets well, buy a house there for her to live in when the going gets rough in New Orleans.