I’m sitting here at work knowing full well that the Mr. Coffee that my cousin Eleanore gave me for Christmas is going full blast and there’s not a thing I can do about it. I knew as soon as I pulled into the parking lot that I forgot to turn it off. I knew when I looked up at our sign here in front of the bank that gives the time and temp; it said 80 F and I thought, hot, Jesus it is hot, blazing hot, and since I have a fear of fire and have my entire life since I saw the movie Jane Eyre, I happened to think of the Mr. Coffee and how I had thought I might want to drink that little bit there in the bottom after I put on my makeup and somehow in the midst of mascara and cover up, my mind wandered right on into wanting to wax my legs and see how it did. “It hurts like hell,” Eleanore has said and that’s what I was thinking right up until I parked and saw the time-and-temp sign.
I don’t tell anybody this but I’ve yet to learn the C temp and how to figure it out and so I always have to wait around for the F one. What bothers me is that some days waiting for the time to flash up is like waiting for Christmas and other good days—before you can make it out (all the dots don’t always work), it’s all changed on you. That’s how it was this morning. I don’t know who here is in charge of that sign; I’m not. I’m a teller, which they tell me is “a foot in the door,” “a base to grow upon,” and so on. A check to pay off Visa is more like it.
There’s nothing I can do about the Mr. Coffee right this second. I barely get a coffee break and I know they aren’t going to let me drive clear across town to check on something that I might or might not have done. It’s happened before that I have thought the oven was on and such, only to find that I had turned it off without even knowing. “I live by my instincts,” I’ve told Eleanore and that’s true. And so I could’ve cut it off, instinctively. All of us have done things instinctively only to find out we didn’t remember doing it. Some people spend years that way.
Eighty-two degrees Fahrenheit. I can read it loud and clear, not a dot out of place, and I know that any minute now that condo I rent is going to bust into flames. It starts there at the Mr. Coffee, wedged right between the microwave and the wok: a little piece of paper towel ignites, catches hold of my new Dinah Shore kitchen rags, which are just for show and stay dry as a bone since my condo has a dishwasher and I let the dishes air dry. It spreads from there past the condo’s miniblinds to my little oil lamp that says “Light My Fire” and that I won at a fair once for hitting a woman’s big round butt with a beanbag. I never would’ve picked that lamp but free is free and so I took it and went ahead with Larrette over to the funny mirrors, which is all she wanted to do. “Fat,” she would say and hide between my legs. She is only two and doesn’t have many more words than what she saw in the mirrors—big, little, funny, and of course, kitty and puppy. There weren’t any animals at the fair but those are her favorite words. If she likes something she’ll call it kitty. If I could rig up some mirrors at home like that, she’d stay busy for hours but I’m not real sure how it’s all done, which I guess is why you only see them at a fair or someplace special. I bought a little compact at Woolworth’s that was on the sale table, and that mirror was so bad and wavy, I just knew Larrette would love it. She threw it to the floor and it cracked and sparkled all over the condo kitchen. “Seven years, puppy,” I said to her but I’m not worried. I figure I’ve had my seven already.
Larrette is my daughter by Larry Cross of Shallotte, North Carolina, and he is—cross I mean. So we never see him at all, mainly because he lives in California doing odd jobs. “The sea is in my blood,” he used to say just because he grew up in Shallotte, which is nothing but a spit from the ocean. And I told him that, yeah, if stretching out in the sun with little to no clothes on, sipping a Bud, and riding the waves is what it takes to have the sea in your blood, well then, yeah boy, I’ve got it in mine, too. “Only that kind of blood calls for money,” I told him. “The average American cannot sunbathe straight from May to September.” I meant due to finances, of course, but I couldn’t even if I was Jackie O. because I’m fair-skinned; a strawberry blonde almost always is and my dermatologist tells me that skin cancer is bad in this area. That’s probably one reason right there why I instinctively took up with Larry Cross. He had the tan that I had never had; he could have passed for Spanish if he could have kept his mouth shut which he couldn’t. Open his mouth and Shallotte was written all over him.
I tell people that Larry Cross does odd jobs in California, when the truth is that I have no earthly idea what he does and I didn’t when I was staying there with him in Fuquay-Varina. I think he must’ve dealt in drugs or something underhanded from the looks of the people who would appear at my door at all hours of the night and day when decent people are either at work or at home watching TV.
I never married Larry Cross because I wasn’t about to saddle myself with trash. I say that now, but I guess there were some times when I thought we would get married; I guess I was thinking that when I was carrying Larrette and he was so proud of himself for getting me that way. And just as soon as Larrette had popped out Larry went and bought himself a surfboard with no surf whatsoever there in Fuquay-Varina (my instincts told me it wouldn’t work). There were bills to pay which I had always paid and he was over there drinking a beer and listening to the Beach Boys singing, “Catch a wave and you’re sitting on top of the world.”
“What’re you going to do come low tide?” I asked him. What we had wasn’t a home, so one day I just up and left, me and Larrette. We moved to Raleigh and stayed with Eleanore until I got my job here. Then before I knew it, I was going to the state fair and living in a condo with a wreath on every wall and a big hooked rug that I bought at the outlet mall over near the airport. That place has got everything you might want and then some. Everything.
If that oil lamp catches fire, it’s all over. Everything I own will bust right into flames and I’ll have to start all over putting my life into perspective. And I like that word—perspective—it can make something sound a lot more important than it is. Not that I don’t value my life, because I do, but sometimes I wish that I could spread it all out on a piece of paper and take some Wite-out to it. Larry Cross would be the first to go. I tell people (if they happen to ask) that he does odd jobs in California. I don’t tell them that I think he’s a drug pusher because that would stick and get turned right back around and follow me like gum on a shoe wherever I may go in this life. They’d say, “That’s Maureen Dummer, who works as a teller and used to live with a pusher down in Fuquay-Varina,” and I can’t have that. Now people just say things like “That’s Maureen Dummer, who works down there at the First Union Bank; she’s the teller with the strawberry-blond hair that looks a tiny bit like Krystle Carrington off Dynasty. She has a cute little girl by the name of Larrette. No, she’s a single parent.”
If my daddy wasn’t already dead, I’d want to kill him for not changing our name legal to something else. “She’s Dummer!” That’s what children said to me at school, and I know they’ll do it to Larrette if I don’t get married and have whoever adopt her first. Some things never change—children teasing other children and people taking a little information and turning it all around and sticking it to you like a wad of Juicy Fruit. We can’t chew gum while on the window or smoke cigarettes. “It looks bad,” my boss, Mr. Crown, says, and I could bust his crown. I work right here and yet when I decided to get me a Visa card, I had one hell of a time. To get a card you have to show that you charge up a blue streak, that you owe money here and there. “I have always paid what I owe,” I told him, only to be told that I have no credit. I went and got me a microwave and a washer and dryer on time so I could owe some money and get a card so I’d be able to write a check in the grocery store. I probably couldn’t have done that if Earl Taylor hadn’t been working there in Sears and hadn’t been taken with me. He asked me to go for dinner and I asked him to let me charge and pay on time and we shook on it, ate Chinese food, and the next day my things were delivered. Larrette had a fit over those big pasteboard boxes. I’ve been going out with Earl ever since.
I figure Larry Cross has himself one of those sticks that’ll beep if he’s walking there on the strand and happens upon some change. That’s what he does all day long, that and take pills and sell pills and do sex stuff. I’d be stupid to tell all of that and I am not stupid. “Why did you take a check that wasn’t endorsed?” Mr. Crown asked me first thing this morning, those other girls studying their papers like they were still in school, thankful to death, I know, that I had done it and not them. “You’re not stupid, Maureen,” he said and I said, “No, sir, I am not.” I can admit to a mistake; it’s easy if you’ve got the right perspective on it all; such as, Mr. Crown sits in a leather chair all day long and never once has to touch a nasty old piece of money that has been God only knows where and might have some disease on it. If Mr. Crown sat here at the window and saw what’s going in and out of this place, who’s bouncing and who’s scrimping, then he’d be likely to mess up occasionally, too. “You’ve got to concentrate, Maureen.”
And I’m certainly not stupid. Stupid would be if I told all I know about Larry Cross. Sex stuff, that’s the only reason I got hooked up with Larry Cross to begin with and that ties right in with that Spanish tan and hairy chest because he was right good-looking in an apelike way. He looked like those little he-men dolls, except his hair was black and he had a real full beard like that man on “Little House on the Prairie” not Little Joe Cartwright but that other man that lived all alone most of the shows and dated that schoolteacher a time or two. Larry Cross was all right but I’m not stupid. I mean, why would I marry trash? Especially trash with a last name that isn’t much better than my own. Taylor—that’s Earl’s last name and one I’m thinking I could probably live with.
Sometimes my mouth gets all worked up with saliva handling all this money. I am not good with money. That’s my biggest fault. It’s a fault I’ve always had; if it’s in my wallet then I just naturally think it’s for spending and that outlet mall can get me in a whip-snap. Larry Cross had the fault of spending worse than me. If I was still with him he’d probably be sitting in the living room of that condo with those long legs stretched out on the coffee table and he’d be wearing nothing but some bathing trunks, letting the kitchen burn down, while he drew up a plan of how I could slip a little money every now and then. Embezzle is the word and I’d put my body on the street before I ever did that. I’ve got Larrette to think of but would he have ever thought of Larrette as something other than a Frisbee fetcher? No, no way. “I am not a dog,” I told him when he’d say, “Honey, can you reach that Frisbee?” and that Frisbee about a hundred feet from where I was sitting. “If I had a rubber arm,” I’d say.
I’d like for somebody to run my business. It isn’t that I’m not into liberation. God knows, you can just look at me and know that I am; you can know by my credit cards in my wallet, Visa, Ivey’s, and Texaco. But still, it would be so nice to have somebody run my business, somebody who would say, “Now, honey, look here. You just thought you threw out your W-2 and here it is right under this stack of Christmas cards that you forgot to open.” Take Earl Taylor, for example.
“I’d rather not,” Eleanore always says when I say that. Eleanore is a teacher’s aide in the elementary school and that has slowed her thoughts down some, though she’s real good with Larrette. She was the first one to get Larrette to say kitty and to learn to meow.
Eleanore goes with a man who already has a wife, so she can’t really talk much. She only gets to see him every now and then at the Ramada Inn in Apex. She thinks he’s going to leave that wife that drives a mini-van and heads up Easter Seals every year, and those two babies and that house that looks like a little fairy cottage out in a nice part of town for her. She likes for me to get in my car and drive her by that house late at night and she’ll say things like, “Yep, TV’s on. I knew he’d be watching TV. I know that man like the back of my hand. He’s sitting up late watching the TV so he doesn’t have to get in the bed with her.” Eleanore doesn’t know any better. She’s two years older than me, thirty-one, but she doesn’t know a bit better. She hasn’t had life’s lessons taught to her like I did staying in Fuquay with Larry Cross. I shouldn’t encourage that. I shouldn’t even drive her past that house for her to fill her head with stories, but sometimes it’s fun. Sometimes we say we’re going to disguise ourselves in case a cop should pull us over right there in front of that house, so I put on some sunglasses and tie a scarf to my head and I must admit that I like to do that because it makes me feel like I look a little like Susan Hayward and so I say things like “I Want to Live!” or “I’d Climb the Highest Mountain!” or “Let’s ride on ‘Back Street’!” and Eleanore will take it in her head that if she wears a gingham shirt and sunglasses that she looks like Doris Day and she will say, “Lover Come Back!” and “Where Were You When the Lights Went Out?” We have some fun times, me and Eleanore, and we always have, but then I have to get serious.
“Eleanore, you might as well look elsewhere,” I say, and she rolls those big blue eyes that are common among us Dummers (her mama was a Dummer) like I might be a little breeze whistling past her ear. You can’t tell her.
“I don’t know what you see in Earl Taylor,” she says. “Earl Taylor is a little nerd.” I can see where she gets that. I can. To somebody who doesn’t know Earl Taylor like I know him, he might look that way because of the way his hair is so thin and weak-looking and those glasses that he has to wear. But Earl is smart and that’s how he looks. He looks like somebody that can handle figures and money. Now, he doesn’t make a bed slope way off to one side or creak and groan like Larry Cross did, and he doesn’t make me creak and groan like Larry Cross did. As a matter of fact, Earl can get in and out of a bed and you don’t even know he’s been there. Now, I don’t want anybody getting me wrong because there is no such goings on in that condo with Larrette right there in the same dwelling. The only time that Earl and me have actually spent the night until dawn in a bed together was the weekend that Eleanore kept Larrette and we went down to Ocean Drive, which might as well be Myrtle Beach the way it’s grown. “Myrtle Beach, Ocean Drive, they run right together,” Earl said, and he was right. I couldn’t have drawn a line between the two if I had had to. Other than that, we just pop over to Earl’s place every now and then. He has a bed that’s just on a frame with a green glass-shaded floor lamp right there beside it so he can read in bed. Earl likes that green glass lamp shade because it’s related to his profession, but that green glass is the only adornment of any kind that he owns. Plain. It’s all real plain, but it’s clean.
Earl is smarter than Larry Cross was even before he killed off so many brain cells. I looked it all up in the library while I was in Fuquay. I looked up drugs and one thing led to another till pretty soon I was reading on brain cells and come to find out that once they’re dead, they’re dead. As dead as that rubber tree that Eleanore has in her living room thinking it’s gonna bush back and be something. Larry Cross will never be something.
Earl Taylor is already something; he’s in charge of finances at Sears. He banks here with us and so I’ve seen his savings account and it is a fat one. That doesn’t surprise me a bit because it’s obvious that he doesn’t throw money away; it’s obvious by the way that his place is so plain and the way that he wears clothes that mix and mingle to the degree that it seems like he has on the same outfit every single day. When I think of Earl, I think khaki and oxford cloth. When I think of Larry Cross, I think Levi’s and loud Hawaiian shirts, and loud-colored swim trunks and gym shorts. Flashy—Larry Cross is flashy with the money he doesn’t have and that little Spitfire convertible in bright orange that I was forever needing to jump with my VW Bug. Earl Taylor drives a Mazda, a nice, neat, plain, navy Mazda that he vacuums on a regular basis. Sometimes we’ll be on our way out to eat and Earl will whip right in the Drive-Thru Klean-a-Kar and pop a quarter into that vacuum and run over things. He took the shoes right off of my feet and cleaned up the bottom of them for me. Night and day. That’s what Larry Cross and Earl Taylor are.
“You are making a big mistake if you get hooked up with him,” Eleanore tells me. Eleanore comes over every Tuesday night and fills my washer full of slinky nightwear she only wears in Apex. “What you like about Earl is how he isn’t like Larry. Now tell the truth.” Eleanore always says that, “Now tell the truth,” but she only wants your truth; she turns a deaf ear if you discuss her truth.
“That’s not the reason,” I tell her. “Earl is a good businessman.”
“And Larry Cross was not,” she’ll snap, though I know he must’ve done all right to have had that stream of weirdos coming by all the time. Of course, I never say that.
“Earl is as neat as a pin.”
“And Larry Cross was a slob,” she says and doesn’t even pause to breathe. “And I’ll give you the last one. Larry Cross, as worthless as he is, is good-looking and Earl Taylor is not.”
“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” I tell her, though I know better. “Beauty is only skin deep and Earl goes through and through.”
“How? Name one way.” Eleanore is so persistent with perspectives other than her own.
“He fixed it so I could get myself established with credit.”
“That’s his job. Name another.”
“He’s sweet to Larrette,” I say, and Eleanore can’t deny that one because she’s never seen Earl around Larrette that much.
“What does he think about the way you spend money? What does he think about the way you order just about everything that Yield House has to offer?”
“Earl doesn’t care,” I tell her and that’s true. Half the time Earl doesn’t even notice, which is, I guess, another difference between him and Larry Cross. If Larry Cross was to slap those long legs up on a brand new butler’s table, he’d at least notice. He’d say, “Where’d you get this?” and I’d say what I always said, “At the getting place.” Larry Cross didn’t know a thing about the business because I made the money and I paid the bills and I just about lost my mind doing it.
There’s a woman leaning out of her car window right now with a check and a deposit slip in her hand and a diamond that would make anybody proud sparkling on her finger. “Hi, Gail, how are you today?” I say before I even open the drawer and pull it back in. I know her without even looking at the name on her deposit slip because she comes in every Monday with her husband’s check that he got on Friday. William Anderson, MD, and her name is right there under his, Gail Mason-Anderson. That check is something, too; I bet the United States of this country makes more off of one of William Anderson’s checks than I make in four months gross. They live on Winona in a two-story house that’s got a pool in the back. I know because I looked for that house when I rode Eleanore by to see whether or not her boyfriend was really out of town on the weekend when they were supposed to meet in Apex. He wasn’t. He was right there in his backyard, wearing an apron and carrying barbecue tongs, with cars lined up on either side of the street. “He’s out of town all right,” I told Eleanore.
“It’s her,” she said. “She makes him do all these social things with people he can’t stand. He does it to keep her off his back just a little bit.”
“He lied,” I told her.
“He didn’t want me to be hurt by it.” She had taken off her Doris Day glasses and wiped her eyes. “He’s protective of my feelings.”
I sang “Que Será, Será” but it didn’t perk her up. It made her mad, to be perfectly honest, and so she lit into Earl Taylor like a fly on you know what, because that’s what she always does when her own life is going bad and she has no choice but to admit it.
“I hope you had a nice weekend, Gail,” I say when I slip back that deposit slip minus the 150 dollars that I put in one of our little envelopes. Now she’s going over to Kroger’s and put that 150 dollars to use, does it every Monday. I know Gail Mason-Anderson like the back of my hand.
“I did,” Gail says, but she doesn’t look at me because she’s checking to make sure that I gave her the 150 she requested. Seven twenties and one ten, can’t get any closer than that, though I’m not offended when people do that. I’m glad people sit right there and check it because if she got to Kroger’s and then came back it would be her word against mine and Mr. Crown would chew me out whether I was in the right or wrong. “Think of the ways people could trick us out of money,” I told him one day and it’s the truth. There are numerous ways that you might trick a teller out of money and it is my job to keep that from happening. Not that I think Gail Mason-Anderson would do any such thing. She doesn’t have to. I bet she and William Anderson have a man who looks a lot like Earl Taylor to just figure it all up for them.
I like to think of having a hyphenated name myself. Maureen Dummer hyphen something. Maureen Dummer-Taylor with right above it Earl Sinco Taylor. “Your name sounds like a plumbing product,” I told him, only to find that I had hurt his feelings. Sinco is a name from somewhere in his mama’s family, and since his mama is dead, it made him real defensive that I should laugh at that name.
“Thank you,” Gail says. I read her lips because I’ve already cut off my speaker. She drives a diesel-powered Audi, and it wrecks my ears to hear it going on and on and ricocheting off the little drive-through area. I just nod and watch Gail Mason-Anderson go straight to Kroger’s.
Eighty-five degrees F and 11:37. I decide I’ll go and take my lunch hour a little early. I do that every now and again when it’s important like today when I am not going to Eckerd’s and order a grilled cheese but am going home and make sure there’s no fire started. It will take the whole hour but it’s the only way that I can stay in my seat the rest of the afternoon, not to mention that I have got a little nic craving that I can’t hold off anymore. I don’t even bring my cigarettes into this building because it would be such a temptation, not to mention that Trish, who sits at the other little opening, wears one of those badges that has a picture with a slash through it. A picture paints a thousand words and I don’t need to be hit over the head. Trish has a husband and that’s how she can afford to be so outspoken. She hates cigarettes and loves manatees, the Cape Hatteras lighthouse, Statue of Liberty, 96LITE, and Jesus. You can read it all right there on the bumper of her car. I personally would not open my life like a book to the world. I have a sticker that says GET OFF MY REAR! and that’s all. Trish brakes for animals but won’t answer a person when they say they’re going to lunch. She just looks at the clock machine and rolls her eyes like I’m going to abuse the system and stay out until one instead of returning at 12:53, which will be exactly an hour from when my car exits the lot, give or take a few minutes. Trish supports the system, the public schools, the Little Theater, the President, and whales. All I know about Trish I’ve learned right off of that car. Her savings account shared with Edward Hunter cannot touch the savings account of Gail Mason-Anderson and William or that of Earl Sinco Taylor.
Now I feel like I can’t get this Bug to go fast enough. It’s like all of a sudden I’m in a panic to see my condo still standing with my potted geranium on the front stoop and my straw hat with lacy ribbons on my door. Welcome and welcome relief it is when I turn this corner a little and see it. What I don’t welcome is Eleanore standing on the sidewalk with what looks like catsup or poster paints there on the front of her blouse that I gave her for her birthday two years ago. That blouse not only is out of style but if it was in style it is far too frilly for a Monday morning in the elementary school. “It’s a church blouse,” I told her and she gave me the Dummer eye.
Eleanore has always taken things personally. The time I told her that there is a difference in the country look that is authentic and the country look that is a hodge-podge of too much of a good thing, she took it personally and I certainly didn’t mean it for her personally, even though she does not need one more rooster looking like it’s about to crow tacked up on her kitchen wall. I think it’s symbolic that she’s so into roosters, all that strutting and taking hold of every hen and that’s not even touching the biblical symbol, three crows and you’re out.
“Where have you been?” she asks just as soon as I step out of the Bug and this heat hits my head like a ton of bricks. “I’ve been waiting forever.”
“I didn’t know you were coming,” I tell her. I do more than tell her. I state it like the fact that it is. This isn’t the first time Eleanore has pulled such a visit only to turn it around and make it my fault that she’s been waiting. And where else would I have been but at the bank, here in this navy linen suit with matching pumps, and little canvas clutch? Every fiber of my Monday-through-Friday wardrobe says “teller.”
I get up close and I can see that Eleanore has been crying, and it takes me a second to remember why I trucked clean across town home—the Mr. Coffee. “Come on in,” I tell her. “I’m afraid I left the Mr. Coffee on.” Eleanore follows me in and just about falls down on a Fisher-Price bathtub frog which Larrette meows to. We both have tried to teach her to say “frog” but she is as stubborn in that way as Larry Cross. “Gotta love that Squeaky,” he used to say to me and throw those gorilla arms around my hips. He called me Squeaky because he thought I looked like that woman that tried to shoot Gerald Ford that time, and I don’t. “I love my Squeaky,” he would say because he didn’t have much sense, but God, just the thought of that bed breaking down and not even fazing that man makes my heart skip a beat or two.
It’s on. Plugged in and on, that pot bottom dried into nothing but crisp brown sludge. “I did it,” I say to Eleanore, who is at that kitchen table with a Kleenex up to her face. “Thank God, there wasn’t a fire.”
“He’s gone back to his wife,” Eleanore sobs. “Don’t you say ‘I told you so’ one time since I’m going ahead and saying it for you.”
I’m a little confused since to my knowledge he never left his wife to begin with. “I didn’t know he had left her.”
“He left her a year ago. He left her that first night we stayed in Apex and he told me that he loved me like he had never loved anybody.” Eleanore primps up and sobs again, wiping her mascara on my linen pineapple-print napkins. “I mean he still lived there, with her, but it was me he loved.” I listen to Eleanore telling the details of it all while the Mr. Coffee pot cools enough that I can rinse out that crud, but while Eleanore is going on my mind is thinking over that word love, and how it is used and misused and abused. Earl Taylor has said that word one time when it referred to me. Once, and I’m thinking that that isn’t good enough. I’m thinking of “Love my Squeaky” and Larry Cross might have meant it as much as if he’d said “Love my Carpet,” but still he said it.
“He said if he could live his life over that he would be with me,” Eleanore says and looks up from my napkin, black smudges all over it. “He said it on the phone and then there came a sweetheart rose to the school office. No card. It’s right out there in my car if you want to see it.”
“I don’t need to see it,” I tell her. “But what would you have done if I hadn’t come to lunch?”
“You usually do come to lunch,” Eleanore says. “You’re usually here by eleven-thirty.”
“Well,” I say because I’ve never thought that she would busy herself to pick up on my daily patterns.
“Mr. Coffee, iron, oven, it’s always something.” Eleanore goes over and gets Larrette’s little frog and hugs it. It squeaks. I hear a squeak squeaky loud and clear, Larry Cross and bedsprings that Earl Taylor couldn’t squeak if he did a somersault with bricks tied around his neck. “I know you like a book, Maureen.”
“I reckon you do,” I say and rinse that napkin out in cold water and a little Stanley spot remover. “Must be the Dummer in us.”
“I know Tuesday is my wash night but I was wondering if I could come over tonight instead,” Eleanore says, and there’s no way I can tell her no. It’s my night to cook a little something for me and Earl and for us to watch “Cagney and Lacy” and I don’t even care. I don’t even care that I’m going to break that pattern starting tonight, and if Gail Mason-Anderson had some sense she’d break her habit and occasionally go to Harris Teeter, where they’ve got fresh seafood coming in by the barrel.
“I think that’s a good idea,” I tell her and go over to touch that pot to see if it’s cooled down enough that it won’t crack.
“What about Earl Taylor?”
“Well, Earl Taylor can do something else. Earl Taylor can vacuum his Mazda, for example.” I run warm water first and take my Tuffy pad to the bottom of that pot. “Let’s go to Harris Teeter and buy some scallops,” I say when I’m so happy that pot doesn’t crack and splinter in my hands. “Let’s get some wine and some cheese, not dairy counter but deli cheese. And let’s go in Ivey’s and buy you some cologne and a blouse that’s in style.” Eleanore has taken that personally I can tell, but she is too upset to argue.
“I can’t buy a new blouse,” she says, her eyes watering again. “I don’t get paid until the end of the month.”
“We’ll just put it right on my card,” I tell her. “If it weren’t for you, Larrette probably wouldn’t be speaking at all. I’m expecting any day now that she’s going to get up and say frog and Kermit and everything else that goes with it.” That pot comes clean as a whistle and while it’s air drying, I go and call Trish to say I won’t be back.
“I’ve taken ill,” I tell her. “I could barely get myself to the bathroom.”
“Didn’t you take ill last week?” Trish asks, and I figure she doesn’t even deserve an answer. “Are you expecting?” Trish asks, and I can’t help but laugh a little in between making my voice sound sick, low and slow and sick; I’ve always been able to make my voice that way instinctively. I’d do my voice that way and Larry Cross would make all kinds of promises that he never kept. I did it to Earl once and he didn’t even notice. I’d rather be told a lie than nothing at all, and Trish should feel that way, too.
“I may be,” I tell her. “You might have hit the nail on the head, Trish.”
“Don’t you date Earl Taylor down at Sears?”
“Yes, yes I do.” I tell Trish that I think I’ll go to the doctor and that I’ll see her in the morning. But first I tell her that my cousin, Eleanore Tripper, works in the public schools and once saw a manatee down in Florida. This is the most me and Trish have ever even conversed. Now I call Earl to say I’m tied up for the evening.
“But it’s Monday,” he says. “‘Cagney and Lacy’ comes on.” He states all that as a fact and I realize that all Earl has ever done to me is state facts. A fact is just a base, a foot in the door, to perspectives and instincts. Earl Taylor has got a lot to learn. “What am I going to do?” he asks, and I can tell he is in a hurry because he is not one to squander work time.
“You could vacuum your car.”
“I did that yesterday.”
“You could go shopping.”
“I don’t need anything,” he says, which is a lie, though he thinks it is the truth. He needs some pictures on his wall and to rip up that shag carpet, finish those floors, and buy himself some pretty braided rugs. He could use a grapevine wreath, a shower curtain other than a white cheapo liner, and some pretty towels that match. He needs a headboard and an Alexander Julian shirt and some contact lenses and some hair conditioner that’ll give body. He needs a body, a membership at a spa, barbells.
“Oh now, Earl,” I say. “I bet if you went to the mall you could find some things you need.”
“I don’t believe in just going out and spending money,” he says and sounds a little exasperated, and I know just how he’s looking with that exasperation, red-eared, bleary-eyed, and dull in an official way. “And I really can’t talk. I’m working. You should be working.”
I start to tell him that he could gain some weight but I don’t. I just hang up, put on my sunglasses, and go get my scarf to tie on my head. “Let’s wear our outfits to the Harris Teeter,” I say. “No telling who might see me and run by First Union to tell it.” For the first time Eleanore smiles; it’s a weak smile and I know the whole night is going to be potato chips and Cokes and her tears working like a faucet. She puts on her glasses and says she’ll pretend she’s wearing a gingham shirt, and off we go once I check to make sure the hot rollers or Larrette’s vaporizer aren’t still going.
We pass the North Carolina Bank and Trust and their sign says 88 F and I can believe it. It’s hot and clear and feels so good I could stretch out like a dog with little to no clothes on and imagine Larry Cross out walking some strand with his beeper stick and thinking of me, thinking that he was a fool not to know what he had when he had it. I know that’s probably a lie but right now I like to believe it. Right now I can believe in that lie and keep it all in perspective.
“Lover Come Back,” Eleanore says, and though the tears come to her eyes, she sings a little of “Que Será, Será.” Will I be pretty? Will I be rich?
“I Want to Live,” I tell her, and I toot that VW horn to do a “Que Será, Será,” and that’s no lie. We pass by First Union and I hold my head high since I’ve got on my costume, and I don’t even look to see what time of day it may be and I don’t even care that that fair-skinned arm of mine hanging out the window could get burned to a Jane Eyre crisp on a day like today. And I wouldn’t trade places with Trish sitting there under the green lights, or Gail Mason-Anderson with her cabinets overflowed with Kroger bags or her purse filled up with deposit slips with my initials, or my cousin Eleanore, who is staring out the window through a steady stream of tears while she tries to get a better perspective on things.