Carolina Moon Read online

  Now June was watching the woman next door. She leaned in close and began singing “Let It Be.” She nudged him with her elbow. “Mother Mary comes to me . . . ,” she was singing in his ear, her breath and laugh tickling his neck. It was exactly what Sarah would have done, and before he knew it, he had his arms wrapped around her and had pulled her close. Her hair smelled like Sarah, her clothes. If things were different, Sarah would be over in the swing singing along with her. June would talk about the old boyfriend or a recent date, and they would say things like, “Excluding present company, men are just that way. . . .”

  She hugged him back, and that’s when he realized things were different. There had been no local dates, no mention of any new prospects, like she used to run by Sarah. She had brought dinner by on several occasions. She called him at the end of the day to talk about her fifth-grade class and to ask why she hadn’t gone to law school. She was trying to fill in his empty spaces, and she was relying on him to fill in hers.

  “So, that old TomCat is good-looking, why don’t you ask him out?” Reluctantly he pulled away so that he could look at her.

  “Nah.” She sat back, her hands folded in her lap. “TomCat is an old friend, you know? It would almost be incestuous.” The woman next door had gone inside and two of the children were running around Mary. It looked like Mother Mary was their base in a game of tag. “It would be like being with you!” She nudged him again and laughed.

  “So Sarah and TomCat were that close, huh?”

  She shrugged. “They were close.”

  “Her parents didn’t like him?”

  “Oh, I’m sure they did,” she said. “I mean you’d have to like him, you know? Sweet guy with a hard life.”

  “So what happened?”

  “In his life?” she asked, and he shook his head. Sarah had told him much of that story. More than he wanted, really. Who wants to feel waves of pity for the competition?

  “They just grew apart.” She looked at him as if to say, You know all of this, this is old news, but she quickly changed the tone. “And then you happened, Mack McCallister. You happened.”

  NOW MACK FINDS himself thinking of June when he’s lying in bed and at odd times during the day. He sniffs his shirt for traces of her cologne. He studies the bathroom after she’s been there, a single long coarse hair occasionally in the sink over which she has stood and brushed. Now there are nights when he catches himself thinking of her eyes, her hips, thin and boyish, and he feels guilty. But it feels so good to picture her, feels so good to rewind and replay words exchanged between the two of them. He tells himself that he will just let it all go, that he’ll call Sarah’s mother and talk to her, cry to her, that he will call his own mother, and then the phone will ring and he can’t get there fast enough, or like now he will pick up and dial her number as quickly and easily as Sarah always has. When the machine answers and beeps, he catches himself sighing and then delivers in practiced monotone how he so occupied her time today that they never got around to talking about Ted, and how if she still needed a friend he was here, and he hoped that she knew that he would love to hear all about that asshole Ted.

  “Mack? Is that you?” She is all out of breath. “Hold on, I was just bringing in the groceries.” He tries to imagine June in her own world, but it’s now been over a year since he and Sarah were over there. It was a place Sarah usually went to alone. If there was a double date, they usually went out or came here to his and Sarah’s house. “Hi.”

  “Hi.”

  “What’s up? Is everything okay?”

  “Yeah, the same. I just wanted to say that I wasn’t a very good friend to you today and I’m sorry.”

  “But you were. Really.”

  Mack sits now with his hand covering Sarah’s hand. The sitter’s needlepoint is in the chair by the bed; Sarah’s parents had hired her to be there while he’s at work. They had known her for years. They wrote her check. They came and paid the sitter, just as they had done years before when Sarah was a child and they went out on Saturday nights.

  “Please let her come home with us,” Sarah’s mother kept saying, and there were times like now—June inviting him over for dinner—that he wishes he could.

  “Of course you can’t,” June says. “I’m so stupid.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “I’ll bring dinner there, how about that?” she asks. “It’s just pasta and some kind of sauce you know. Easy stuff and a salad.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. Absolutely.”

  “Thanks.” He hangs up the phone and comes back over to readjust the tape on the feeding tube entering her nostril, makes sure there are no kinks in the line. This is when he feels guilty. Times like this when what he really wants to do is step out into the night and into his car and go for a long drive. No planning, no scheduling. He gently rests his head on her chest and listens to the dull thud, wishing with all his might that something would happen, that someone or something would intervene.

  Amazing how slow a satellite post office can get, even during the vacation season. Wallace Johnson suspects that it all has a lot to do with busy, busy lives and a lot to do with computers. About once a month, somebody will come bustling in, all wildeyed with a sack of papers, looking over that small room for a fax machine. He tells them that all they have is a copying machine, which used to be what everybody in a hurry needed, and overnight mail, which may or may not really make it overnight depending on when you sign off. It’s a very different speed people live in now, even when they’re on vacation. As far as Wallace is concerned, that’s their loss. He would just as soon read. The paper. The tide chart. The little descriptions of all the stamps issued: lighthouses, comedians, Elvis and Einstein. If you can name it, it’s probably on a stamp. And when he’s all alone, like now, he likes to read the letters.

  APRIL 1973

  Dear Wayward One,

  My whole life I have studied architecture. Not anything formal of course, just shapes and angles, windows facing east like the old-timey graves. Let me see the sun rise on Judgment Day. Oh God, what if there IS a judgment day? It’s starting to worry me a little. You know now people don’t seem to give a damn how they’re buried—one on top of another, right side up. I guess I always liked the notion of those mausoleums, but that’s just because my whole life I have had a romance with little houses—playhouses, dollhouses, little dioramas like folks used to make out of a shoebox, a little wax paper window at a far end. I once made the Sahara Desert and my teacher said it wasn’t anything but a box of sand. She was not what I’d call a real imaginative sort. I like the notion of dark little houses, little windows and lifeless curtains. I see such houses and I think of all the folks who pass them by without a single notice, because of that exterior paint or maybe because it’s, say, over a business establishment or something. Imagine then that what you can’t see behind those tired dirty drapes is a love-filled life: maybe there’s a mama and a daddy curled up in their bed, and they are happy just because they have each other. And in the next room their children sleep and dream of ways to make those parents glad that they gave them life, glad that they have to work so hard to keep them all moving and growing and going. They have a plan and a purpose. I felt that I had a plan way back, when I sat under my house. I still do, though certainly my plans have changed numerous times over the years. You see, I thought we were like that couple in my dream. I thought we were that secret secret love—something pure and perfect beating behind the most sordid of scenes, or what would look that way to anybody just passing by and giving that old beach house a once-over. What will always give me a start is how I drove off, imagining you with that pillow clutched to your chest, your strong tan leg thrown over the blanket where I had been lying just moments before. Remember how I told you I had the hot foot, had to sleep with my left foot out from under the covers. You laughed great big when I said that my mama had a hot foot, as well as her mama before her. You laughed like a man who might roll over and invite m
e for another romp, a man who might get up and have a sip of liquor and then write some words. You might put on one of your albums and croon along, slow dance. That was not the laugh of a man who would in less than fifteen minutes blow himself to kingdom come. I drove away through that old Green Swamp that night with my legs shaking, that good tired shaking, and my eyes peeled for headlights coming toward me. I was concerned about some fool drunk driver crossing the line; I was concerned about getting home and into the shower so that my husband would not trace you on me. He still looks at me sometimes, and it’s a look that leaves me wondering if he knows everything there is to know about me or if he knows absolutely nothing. And now I think you must have looked at me and seen those same possibilities. You were always saying how we were soulmates and how I could read you better than you could read yourself, but no, honey, not then, not now. I pictured you with a sheet wrapped around your waist, a cigarette glowing in your hand as you watched my taillights get smaller and smaller. And an hour later when I was showered and fresh, when I had told my husband all about helping this poor old soul with a flat tire and waiting and waiting all night long for the man from the Esso station, when he had asked me just enough questions that seemed to satisfy truth, then we were the ones all curled up behind still drapes. I remember falling asleep that way, my husband’s hand drawn close between my thighs where he said I felt like a furnace. And all the while I thought of you stretched out in those cotton sheets, your lids fluttering with thoughts, ever racing, ever producing those beautifully brilliant thoughts. What I heard the next day was that your brains were everywhere. What brilliance. What generosity. Brains all over this godforsaken world.

  Tom turns from the window where he has watched Quee oversee the trash pickup, and he drives the final nail into the molding at the top of the closet space. Quee didn’t want a door on the closet. Said she preferred the curtain look. She had supplied him with the curtain already on a heavy brass rod and asked that he hang it in place once the closet was finished. The curtain was green, velvet she’d bought from that crazy old junk man she supports. She told Tom when she saw it she knew it was perfect, kind of a Gone with the Wind look to welcome Mary Denise. He figures a Gone with the Wind look means that if this Mary Denise ever finds herself with nothing to wear she could snatch down the curtain over her closet and put it around her. He laughs a crooked laugh, the last nail in one corner of his mouth, because after what Quee told him about this chick, the possibility of her wearing no clothes was quite possible.

  He hears the stairs creaking and the key turn. Impulse makes him pull the curtain closed, and then she is there, this vision. Quee had told him that as far as she could tell the girl was sort of a dingdong, but that the girl’s mama had been like a sister to Quee when they were growing up, and that loyalties never died, real loyalties, that is. Quee said that even if she was a dingdong, she was college-educated and quite attractive, just what she wanted for the in-house therapist of Smoke-Out Signals. Quee said just because she undressed in the movie theater was no reason to condemn her; it might (if the whole story was known) even be a source of admiration for her. She had taken her clothes off, which is exactly what she’s doing now. Tom watches through the split in the velvet, the thick dusty odor of the fabric making him feel like sneezing.

  She slides her jeans down her hips and over her thighs; there’s the imprint of the seam of her pants in the soft white flesh of her leg. Her cotton underwear is ripped up one side; her legs are hairy, knees knobby. The small indentations on either side of the base of her spine are deepened by her swayback stance. She looks at herself in the mirror, sticks out her tongue and then goes over to sit on the edge of the ruffly bed. She lies back and crosses her legs, hands behind her head. “It might just work,” she says and laughs. “It’s no Taj Mahal, but I’m no Sheba either. I’m just free at last, free at last, so fucking free at last.” She begins to unbutton her shirt. Tom tries to look at the floor, to count the nails he has spent the morning driving, but he finds his eyes drawn to her, the last thing he needs about now.

  She goes back over to the mirror and grins at herself, inspects her straight white teeth. “Who the hell are you?” she asks, and his heart freezes in his chest; but she’s talking to herself again. “The Cheshire cat? The Runaway Wife? The Feminine Pee-Wee?” She turns and inhales from an imaginary cigarette. “What a dump!” She parades, dances, shimmies in her ripped-up underwear for what seems an eternity. Who would think that you could get bored spying on a nice-looking, near-naked girl who talks to herself, but here he is. She opens her suitcase and pulls a red and black silky robe from it. It’s that kind of robe that looks Oriental or something; it makes her look a little hookerish. She pulls her hair back in a ponytail, sits cross-legged on the bed and pulls a tape recorder from her bag.

  “Testing, testing . . . yoo-hoo. I’m home! It’s an okay room. Quee is what I expected, not as big as Mama had made her sound, but of course to Mama everybody is BIG.”

  She stretches out flat on her back, one foot propped up on the wall.

  “And she doesn’t look so whorish to me. I like her hair long like that. I’m going to let mine grow that long. Her clothes are kind of weird like Mama said, but all in all I’d much rather be wearing Quee’s muumuu than Mama’s girdle, or whatever it is she wears to keep her butt looking so small. I like a big butt, a butt that moves a little when it walks. I’m thinking I might grow mine a little bigger.”

  She stops the machine and laughs great big and then turns it back on. “Now as for business. I’ve got a plan as to how to divvy up the clients. There are the anals and there are the orals. The one and only client here—let’s call him the guinea pig—is clearly an oral. He talks all the time and even makes his living at it and it’s clear that he eats a lot, and from the looks of the red nose of his I’d venture to guess that he drinks a bit. Clearly he’s oral, but the Spandex Poet who is checking in this very minute is an anal. You can tell by the way she’s way too thin. Eating disorders and anal control impulses seem to go hand in hand. Now what I know from experience is that an oral personality out of control is really bad news. My personal little episode of late is proof of that, but, honey, the worst news you can ever find is an anal in control. Let’s just say, for example, if your spouse is an anal type who gains control then sex is mechanical, food is measured to a T, pennies are pinched, and much time is spent on the toilet wrestling with all sorts of issues that life may present. You are likely to find magazine racks and little mini televisions in such a person’s bathroom. You are likely to find things in the medicine chest alphabetized; there’s probably one economy size of the drugstore brand floss. The utilitarian bathroom. You could live there. There are people I wish would. For business purposes, I will refer to the As and the Os. Look out at the world, and it’s easy as pie to figure. Like look at that show The Odd Couple. Felix is an A and Oscar is an O. Elvis was a cross between the two, probably because he was a twin. Quee is clearly an O, and I think I am, too.”

  By the time she has gone through just about everybody who has ever been on television or in the movies (Bette Midler is oral and Nancy Reagan is anal), Tommy catches himself dozing against the wall. What wakes him up is the sound of his own name being called, and Blackbeard’s bark from the truck. He jerks awake and peeps out in time to see this raging dingdong hide her tape recorder under the bed and pull a pair of jeans up under that skimpy robe.

  “Tom? Where are you?” There is a knock on the door and Denny goes to open it. Quee pushes right in the room, looking all around. “Now where did that boy go?” she asks, and before Tom can think, she pulls back the curtain and there he is like the Wizard of Oz, hammer in hand, nails in his mouth. “I guess you two met, huh?”

  “No, no.” Tom pats his top shirt pocket that has nothing at all in it. “I was wearing my Walkman, didn’t hear a thing.” He steps out and extends his hand. “I’m so embarrassed,” he says and the whole time this Denny is giving him the once-over. She stares hard at his shirt
pocket.

  “What were you listening to?” she asks and pulls that awful-looking robe closer around her body.

  “You mean just now?” He holds his hand up to Denny to pause the conversation and turns to Quee. “Did you need me?”

  “I just want to see you before you leave, that’s all.” Quee stands there looking back and forth between the two of them. She always makes Tom feel like he’s under a microscope, like she’s taking in every square inch of him. It used to make him nervous, but now he knows she’s just trying to place him among all the teenage boys who used to come to her back door. “So when you’re all done, come on back to the clinic. I’m thinking we’ll need to add a little salon before too long, you know, maybe just a room all by itself for the pedicures and such; dim lights, piped-in music, the addict can drink a glass of wine while getting a full foot massage and pedicure, doesn’t that sound good?”

  “I reckon.” Tom looks at Denny. “If you’re into feet.”

  “Well I am into feet,” Quee says and sticks one of hers out into the air, twists it all around. Her skin is white and freckled and her toenails are painted a deep maroon. “I wear a size ten, and I have since I was fourteen. I had to drive clean to Raleigh to find any kind of fancy shoes and it always made me feel so”—she pauses as if struggling to find just the right word—“unique, privileged. . . .” She grins great big at both of them, the kind of grin that is wise and well practiced—fake some might say—her thin eyebrow sharply raised. “Lonnie always said that there was nothing in this world sexier than a great big sturdy woman with extra-large feet.”

  “Really,” Denny says, just as deadpan as you can get. She looks like she is trying not to laugh as she pulls the belt of her robe tighter.

  “Not to say of course that someone of your average size can’t also be sexy.” Quee cups her hand under Denny’s chin and turns her face from side to side, looks at Tom as if to solicit his opinion as well. “I think she’s quite fine-looking, myself. I have always thought, since the day she was born, that she was an absolute beauty.”