DIXIE MCCORMACK HAD A TERROR of parking lots, particularly large ones. They had fled into the store and were fleeing back to the car, Dixie well in the lead. She was carrying five packages in bright package bags. Patsy had only one package, a Jackson Pollock puzzle which she intended to send to her sister Miri. They were crossing a vast suburban parking lot and though it was late October it was still much too warm to be sprinting across large stretches of asphalt. Patsy slowed and walked at her usual pace and her aunt drew farther and farther ahead.
When they finally got to the blue Cadillac her aunt had dumped her five packages in the back seat, fastened her seat belt, turned down the sun visor, and was combing her dark well-dyed red hair. The minute Patsy was in the car Dixie pushed a button and Patsy’s door locked.
“That’s absurd,” Patsy said. “We’re perfectly safe.”
“We are now,” Dixie said. “Nobody’s yanking me out of my own Cadillac.”
“That rape was a month ago and she was just a high school girl,” Patsy said. “Between us we could beat him off if he showed up. Just because it was in this parking lot is no reason to panic.” Her window was remotely controlled, and she looked around to see it going up.
“We might inspire him,” Dixie said. “Two sexy things like us.” As soon as the windows were up she started the air conditioner and cold dry air blew against their legs.
“Between us we could scream loud enough to scare an army,” Patsy said, arguing only for the sake of form.
“They use chloroform,” Dixie said as the car shot backward. “You don’t get time to scream. Let’s go to Neiman’s.”
They whirled out of the parking lot onto the frontage road in front of a giant gravel truck, made a tire-screeching U-turn, and were soon on the freeway heading toward town at a clip so rapid it inspired Patsy to fasten her seat belt.
Dixie was driving with only the heel of one hand on the wheel, cutting smoothly from lane to lane and passing whole schools of cars. There was a look of delight on her face, which forty-five years of life had left plump and virtually unwrinkled. The skyline of downtown Houston appeared ahead of them, indistinct in the hot mists. The inside of the car had become chilly.
“Why must you pass everyone?” Patsy asked.
“The more you pass the more you’re ahead of.”
“I see why you liked Sonny Shanks. The two of you drive alike. On the other hand you hate rapists and I think he’s probably a rapist. I told you what he did to me.”
“He just has a crazy sense of humor,” Dixie said. They curved off the freeway and stopped at a light in front of an antique shop. “I might like some rapists personally, if they weren’t niggers or Nazis. It’s the idea I hate. Sex is bad enough when you do it voluntarily.”
Patsy was surprised by the remark, for her aunt’s affairs were legend. She had been married only once, to a short, fat, goodhearted oilman named Squatty McCormack; they had divorced after three years but Dixie had lived lavishly ever since on the fruits of Squatty’s undimmed devotion. He kept her in cars, clothes, and cash, and in return she kept his favorite bourbon in her liquor cabinet and let him come by and get drunk at her place once in a while, whenever he was up from South America.
“I thought you liked men,” Patsy said a little timidly. “Most people think so, anyway. Momma used to hold it against Daddy, how much you liked men.”
“Poor Garland,” Dixie said, zooping past a blue pickup. “Married to her thirty years and she’s more frigid than me. At least I’m a good cook. I do like men. I’ve had the greatest bunch of boy friends in the country. I even sort of like Squatty, especially when he’s in South America. Now he’s going to Alberta—did I tell you that? Big new field up there. The poor little bastard will probably freeze to death.
“The only bad thing about men is they’re either queer or they want to screw you,” Dixie went on. “The ones who want to screw you are the most fun to hang around with, so I keep having to do it. It’s too bad it never much works, but I guess if it did I’d just go getting married all the time.”
Patsy didn’t know what to say and said nothing. Talk of sex made her shy, no matter who she was talking with. She looked at her aunt and her aunt looked quite merry and happy. She wore a bright orange dress and was as bright of eye as a girl of sixteen. Her energy and her good spirits were so attractive that it was easy to see why men took to her.
“Anyhow, men have always been the only people for me,” Dixie said, looking at a man on the sidewalk, a Cajun type with long sideburns and a ducktail. “I did once know a trombone player it worked with. Boy would I have married him if I could have talked him into it. He wouldn’t have me, though, and then he got shot dead accidentally in a bar in Lake Charles.”
She was tapping her fingers irritably on the steering wheel and looking for gaps in the downtown traffic. “I wish Neiman’s would get a suburban store,” she said. “I hate coming downtown. My one objection to men is that I can’t enjoy myself when somebody’s grunting in my face. Maybe I started off wrong. I raped myself with a carrot when I was about twenty.” She looked over and saw that her niece was blushing.
Patsy was sorry the subject had come up. The thought of her aunt poking herself with a vegetable was startling and unappealing.
“Jim a grunter?” Dixie asked. She had never much liked Jim, as Patsy well knew. She thought he was wishy-washy, and wishy-washy men put her off.
“No, of course not,” Patsy said. “Don’t say anything bad about him, please.”
They whirled into a parking lot. The attendants knew Dixie and came on the run.
“Jim’s darling,” Dixie said, grabbing her purse and taking a final look at herself in the rear-view mirror. “He just doesn’t know the difference between living and existing. He should have hung around Sonny more. Sonny knows that much.”
Patsy was angered, but her aunt was out and off and she didn’t want to argue with her back. They crossed the street on a Don’t Walk sign and were honked at, which flustered her. Going to Neiman’s was not a good idea, anyway. Jim was on a poverty kick again and would not take it kindly if she bought anything, and he would take it even less kindly if she let Dixie buy something for her. She knew she would see something she wanted and be put in a quandary. More and more often, it seemed, she found herself in quandaries, some of them impossible to resolve. They were going to a party at the William Duffins’ that evening—a great honor, apparently, for only a few of the most favored graduate students had been invited. For so serious an occasion she could conceivably get away with a new dress. She looked at several but bought none. Dixie’s buying embarrassed her. It was completely random, but it seemed to delight the salespeople. Soon a string of them were following her like ants, each with his own bit of grain. Patsy found only one thing she could not resist, a lovely glass rose stem, heavy and beautifully simple. She paid for it and once again left with only one package. Dixie had seven.
“I’m hopeless,” she said cheerfully, surveying the back seat full of shopping bags. “I don’t know what I’d do if Squatty stopped giving me money. Most of the men who could afford me wouldn’t be dumb enough to marry me. What did you buy?”
“Just something to put a rose in,” Patsy said.