Later that night, Tessie dropped a note in her stuffed Jerry Box: Had lunch with V. Cruel as ever but kinda funny.
Even though she wrote to him in shorthand sometimes, Jerry's capacity for sending her signs had not diminished. Last year, the night after she wrote “C & D fight all the time. Isn't it time for C to go back home?” Crystal and Dinah had surprised her with a home-cooked dinner: chicken potpie, salad, ice cream, the works. Before they ate, Dinah held up her glass of Cherry Coke and said, “To the best mom in the world.” Crystal raised her glass, looked Tessie in the eye, and said, “To the best mom in the world.” Later, in her note to Jerry she wrote, “Tonight C & D made me feel like a million dollars. Crystal may never go home.”
Begrudgingly, Crystal went to see her mother once a week. “At least call her sometimes,” Tessie would urge.
“Why, so she can ask me if I've lost any weight yet? Think of it this way. I have broken up with my mother. If my daddy was alive, I'd go home all the time. Of course if my daddy was alive, I wouldn't be here in the first place, would I?”
When Crystal left Tessie speechlessâwhich she often didâDinah would step in. “Get off it, Mom. She thinks her mother's a real yoyo, and she's not going home.” It was more like three girls in a dormitory than two girls and a mother. Secretly Tessie felt that the arrangement gave her an edge over Victoria. Her daughter had chosen to live with her instead of her own mother. But more importantly, the arrangement was worth it to Tessie for how the two of them could help each other.
Dinah and Crystal spoke the same language of loss. Often that meant not speaking at all, or letting one or the other of them cry without making a big deal of it. As they lay in bed at night, they would tell “daddy” stories. “My daddy once took me to the botanical gardens near Carbondale. He knew every flower by name.” Or,
“Daddy never screamed or cussed, his voice just dropped and got real cold. Charlie used to call it Daddy's ice voice.” The stories never had punch lines, and no matter how many times they'd repeat them, they'd laugh as if they were hearing them for the first time. Often they'd drop their fathers into conversation as a gift to each other. When Crystal got picked to be a cheerleader, Dinah said, “Your daddy would be so proud of you.” And when Dinah wrote a funny poem for Crystal's birthday, she said, “That's the kind of thing your dad would write.” They'd pretend that their fathers were friends in heaven, and would fantasize about what they were doing. “Tonight they had spaghetti and meatballs, don't you think?” one would tell the other. Sometimes Dinah would pull an old Barton's candy box out of her top drawer. Inside were her “treasures”âher father's old harmonica, his pocketknife with its pearl handle, his address book, an old pair of pliers. She'd spill her treasures on the bed, and the two of them would pour through the address book and try to analyze her father's loopy Y's and wispy T's. She'd imitate how he'd cup his hands around the harmonica when he'd play, like he was telling it a secret. They never spoke of their fathers to anyone else.
Crystal had no treasures from her father; the fire took everything. Occasionally people would send her photographs of him, but her hurt was too fresh; she couldn't look at them. All she had was the locket she wore around her neck: a little gold heart on a chain that he gave her when she turned thirteen. At every football game, right before she'd run onto the field with the other cheerleaders, she'd press the locket to her lips and look up at the sky. She'd rather no one noticed.
As intimate as the girls were at home at night, during the day it was as if they had never met. Crystal was more popular than ever. Suffering a formidable and public tragedy had elevated her status with the kids at school. “You are so brave” or “You are so strong,”
they'd tell her. They assumed she knew things that they didn't. She had become the person that everyone thanked their lucky stars they weren't, though if she knew, she didn't let on. Rather than pity her outright, they made her a cheerleader and president of the Pep Club and anointed her a member of the Homecoming Queen's Court. She'd walk down the hall and people would say “Hey” and she would say “Hey” in an animated voice, as if their greeting had taken her by surprise. At lunch, she'd sit at the table with the football players and the other popular boys who were members of The Key Club, and Wheel Club. (When Dinah said, “They should merge and become “The Bicycle Club,” Crystal pursed her lips and said, “Ha ha. So funny, I forgot to laugh.”) Crystal thrived in her heroism, and accepted her popularity as her due.
If anything, Crystal's popularity made Dinah more headstrong than ever. She cared less about curbing her tongue and being polite, and more about saying what she felt to be the truth. “You should hear her with the boys,” she'd tell her mother. “She has this loud shrieky laugh. She never laughs that way when I say something funny, and trust me, I'm a lot funnier than they are.” Crystal swore she hadn't gone all the way with her boyfriend, Huddie Harwood, a thick, squarely built boy with small gray eyes so close together that he looked perpetually confused, but Dinah was convinced it was just a matter of time. On Saturday nights Huddie would come to the house reeking of Canoe, his flattop perfectly waxed. His cheeks were angled like the bow of a boat, and his moist red lips gave him a sated look, as if he had just polished off a baby. “How do you do, Ma'am,” he'd say to Tessie, as though they'd never met, and to Dinah, “Hello there,” which she did not consider a substitute for conversation.
Crystal was tall now, and stacked. The few pounds of baby fat that drove her mother crazy now gave her hips a sexy curve and filled out her breasts, which only added to her popularity. She'd always
wait until Tessie, Dinah, and Huddie were seated in the living room before making her entrance. That way, everyone would have to notice her hair done up in a tight French twist, the extra load of frosted-blue eye shadow and black mascara, the low-cut chemise she'd bought on her mother's credit at Mina Lee's. “Hi Huddie,” she'd say in a singsong way, as if she knew his secrets. She had this way of lowering her head and raising her eyes toward him like a little girl. Dinah hated that eye-rolling thing. Couldn't anyone else see what an act it was? Then Huddie would smile, only one side of his mouth turning up, and look at Crystal through his slothlike eyes. “Ready-O?” he'd ask, and each time Crystal would laugh as if this was the most original thing she'd ever heard. “Ready-O,” she'd say, her eyes sweeping past Tessie and Dinah and landing right back on Huddie.
Huddie was president of one of those bicycle clubs. He played varsity football and was running for class president. He had a deep round laugh and laughed often so that everyone around him thought they were having a good time. Crystal was helping him with his campaign. At least that's what she'd say when she'd come home from his house at seven o'clock on weeknights, her lipstick smushed around her mouth. “Huddie and I were working on strategies for his campaign.”
Dinah would laugh, “I'll bet you and Huddie were working on strategies.” Crystal would give her one of those “Oh you,” looks and claim she had to finish her homework.
“T
HE GREAT THING
about Crystal Landy, when you get her away from her crowd, is what you see is what you get,” Dinah would tell Charlie. The same could not be said about Dinah Lockhart.
No one knew that during lunchtime Dinah left school, ran south down University Avenue, turned right after the bright orange Gulf sign and just before Fremac's luncheonette, and ducked into the store with the purple and blue neon sign outside that buzzed like a fly zapper.
She'd kiss Charlie on the cheek and tell him what kind of sandwiches she'd brought for lunch. “It's Bologna Day!” she'd exclaim, or “Peanut butter or peanut butter? Your choice.” They'd sit on the two folding bridge chairs behind the counter. “So, BB Girl, how's your day going so far?” he'd ask. She'd tell him about her math teacher who'd showed up with a brown shoe on his left foot and a black one on his right, or how she got the highest grade on her English test. He called her BB Girl after she'd told him how her dad used to call her his Boing Boing Girl. She felt dopey telling him, but then, a few days later he'd said, “How's BB Girl today?” and the nickname stuck. If her dad had lived to see her at sixteen, tall, lean, and graceful with her short curly red hair and quick brown eyes, she imagined he'd know that she'd grown too old and elegant to be anyone's Boing Boing Girl. He'd probably have come up with BB Girl himself. Charlie was amazing that way.
He liked to talk about things that were not necessarily of that time or place, questions you could talk about infinitely and still not come up with answers. He talked about faith, war, the cure for cancer, loss. “Nothing is really gone,” he said one day. “What's gone or taken comes back in different ways. You just have to recognize what they are. My house burned to the ground, but I feel certain I will live in my house somewhere sometime again. It just won't look the same.” Dinah could listen to Charlie talk forever. Sometimes he spoke of the things he saw that later came true. When he told her how he'd had dreams about the fire before it happened, it didn't scare her. She told him about Eddie Fingers, and how after her dad died, she would sometimes lie in bed as still as she could and pretend she was dead, too. “If it hadn't been for Crystal, I might just have died.”
“That girl is a source of life,” said Charlie. “Even though she may be the death of my mother.”
“It would take more than Crystal to kill your mother,” said Dinah.
“My mother. That's a whole other story.” He moved his lips as if he were about to say something else, but then covered his mouth with his hand as if to stop the words from coming.
“What?” asked Dinah, knowing that Charlie rarely spoke unkindly about anyone, even his mother. “You can tell me.”
“What I was thinking is my mother is a life force who feeds her soul by depleting others. Crystal knows that and she refuses to let hers be eaten up. That's why she won't come home.”
As they ate their peanut butter sandwichesâthe corners of their chairs bumped up against each otherâthey stared into the streets of downtown Gainesville. The two-story stucco office buildings looked like sugar cubes under the blaze of the noonday sun. The low-slung phone wires draped across the landscape like sheet music. It was a cloudless afternoon in October, just before homecoming weekend at the university. There were blue-and-orange signs everywhere that said “Go Gators.” Blue-and-orange strips of crepe paper hung from the lamposts and were wrapped around the young live oaks. The festive streamers looked dejected on this humid windless day. The streets were empty, and the whole place had the feeling of a party waiting for its guests. “Take a good look,” said Charlie. “This is the last of it.”
Even though she didn't understand what he meant by his remark, it was the kind of thing he would say that made her feel special. He knew things she would never know and in his wisdom she felt as reassured and comforted as a child enfolded in her father's arms.
It was 12:45, time for Dinah to get back to school. With her pinky, she daintily wiped a piece of peanut butter from the crease of his mouth. “See you tomorrow,” she said. “Tomorrow,” he said, planting a virginal kiss on her forehead. For a long while after she left, he could feel a slight throbbing on the crease of his mouth from where her finger had been. Always this physical discomfort, the afterlife of
her touch, the smell of her clean shampooed hair. For a young man who lived mostly in his head, the rest of his body was making quite a hullabaloo, and he hadn't the slightest idea of what to do about it.
That night, when he came home from work, he could hear his mother and Reggie in the living room, working at the same jigsaw puzzle they'd been putting together for the past three days. It was one of those puzzles with thousands of pieces that came in a large deep box. The picture on the cover was of a cable car running up a street in San Francisco. There were painstaking details of people on the cable car, the tracks in the streets, the bay in the background. Charlie couldn't understand why anyone would spend days recreating what was already so clearly depicted. Where was the surprise or the mystery? He could tell by the sound of his mother's voice that Reggie must have just tried to force a piece with curves into a space defined by edges. “Think, Reggie,” she demanded. “Use your head. God didn't give you brains just to hold up your ears.”
Victoria rarely just spoke to Reggie. She shouted at him in loud imperative sentences, as though she had just grabbed him by the lapels and was shaking him to make a point.
“Hey, I'm home,” said Charlie, rubbing his mother's shoulder as she deliberately fitted what appeared to be the brim of the conductor's navy cap into the tableau on the dining-room table.
“Hello, my precious boy,” said Victoria, her voice suddenly sweet and fluffy, her eyes never leaving the puzzle. “Reggie and I are doing our puzzle.”
Charlie suspected that Reggie felt like a man in jail. “You've done your time,” he wanted to say, but something told him that Reggie was still doing penance. So he winked at him instead.
“Your mama sure does give my brain a work-through,” said Reggie, using the back of his hand to wipe beads of sweat from behind his neck.
“Reggie, if you're going to mop yourself up, be civil and use a handkerchief,” said Victoria, glaring at Reggie's neck. Then, in her softer voice, she said to Charlie, “Darling, Ella's in the kitchen, and I know she's cooked up a nice roast beef. I'll be along shortly.”
“T
HEY'RE QUITE A PAIR
,” Charlie said to Ella, pointing with his eyes toward the living room.
“This goes on all day long. The cussing and the yelling. I'm telling you, I've known Reggie Sykes since the day he was born and I never saw him listen to nobody the way he listens to Mrs. Landy. That boy's got such a bad temper on him, I wonder that he hasn't raised his hand. But he's as meek as a lamb. Lord, forgive me for saying this, but he's a man who has seen the other sideâand it wasn't heaven either. I pray for his soul.”