_________________
Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field till there be no place that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth,
thought Rhonda Robinson as she sewed the zipper back into her favorite winter dress, the pink-and-black gingham fashioned coyly like an oversize maid’s apron. She did not ask herself why those words were on her lips, the Bible drifting gently from cobwebs of melancholy. Tonight was the night for love, a year’s worth of passion; and with her eyes closed and her back to the bedroom window, she enjoyed the surface of nettles that moved beneath her skin, traveling her arms and legs and across her womanly triangle in anticipation of the man from Auntsville. His name was Billy Merry, and he came up to Long Island every December twenty-fourth to make love to Rhonda in various positions of joy and exertion. Otherwise there was little mystery: She knew he had once belonged to her grandmother as a pet or fancy piece of furniture, but now that he had become a man, he was all hers.
She moved the heavy-duty needle back and forth through the ancient fabric—this was a dress she’d been sewing up and down since she arrived on Long Island seven years ago, a dress fashioned into either matronly or sexy, but it was the prettiest one she had. In reality, it never mattered what she was wearing. All he ever wanted was her, the softened spread of woman wrapped snugly around him, licking his salt-block body as if she were dying of thirst.
He usually pulled up at her house around six in the evening. He would get out of the car and stand there like a statue, his sharp country eyes taking in the suburban land, thigh meat bulging from too-tight trousers, chin shaven smooth as a spring limb. From the screen door she’d call his name in varying shades: Bill, William, My Heart, My Lover.
She felt proud of him, of his good looks and musk—a man just as pleasing as those Greek heroes she occasionally glanced in Harriet-Ann Hutchinson’s social studies textbook, The Dawn of Our World. She held the pages at arm’s length and pronounced the names with care, all the while measuring her loneliness in the number of times her breasts knocked against her brassiere. She wished to pronounce something beautifully, but to whom? Who in all of Featherstone really cared? The only person who spoke to her was the janitor, and he was nothing more than an annoyance. Mr. Blank: He had that oldtimishness about him she so despised in the elderly, the desire to talk about nonsubjects with gusto and then the expectation of appreciation, one extraordinarily shameless. She hated that.
But with Billy. This visit was number seven, the lucky visit. She closed her eyes and held the dress still over her lap. He would appeareth. He would cross mountains and nations for her, lift her up like a new bride and carry her toward the couch (the one without slipcovers), breathe in the seams of her dress, tap his hands along her body like a blind man until they reached the zipper and discovered the speckled velvet of her skin. Her arms and belly would be sheathed, as usual, by a last-minute layer of baby powder and Jean Nate. Then the indulgence, the fire of gluttony. Lights flickering on and off, faces creased and then shuttered into nothingness. Afterward, in the remaining ash that was her body, Rhonda would hold his face in her hands and, like a schoolgirl, gaze woefully into his eyes.
They were eyes she recognized all the way back from the fifth grade in the country, Auntsville, North Carolina, where he had been a miserable boy, an undesirable, someone about whom rumors were spread containing words like pervert and bang. It was said that his first girlfriend was a dog; when Rhonda once passed his house and saw the lone hound tied to the mulberry in the parched red yard, she felt a certain amount of pity and jealousy. How was it he could put his finger on desire and name it so painstakingly? Desire was not crystalline; it was murky, unfettered, gargantuan. In the schoolroom, loneliness and foreboding were her sole allies.
Years; and he had grown into a man. Rhonda set the dress down on her bed and (from sheer force of habit) slipped her whole hand between her unpantied legs and tried to relieve herself. His tobacco field cap and armpits entered her mind—all that glorious history, a Greek statue, just like in the book!—and she went to work. Everything down there was wet and swollen, impossible to get through. She stuck her finger as far as it would go. Though she herself was not religious, she now and then stopped her business to ask God why Christmas couldn’t come more than once a year.
As usual, Billy took the Belt Parkway once he made it to New York. He rather hated Long Island and what he perceived was box living, but then there was nothing much going on in Auntsville this time of year, the supply of women being at a low. He was a man who loved love. He loved sex, touching, bedroom camaraderie, the predominance of false intuition. And since Rhonda offered this and more, he would just have to deal with the squared communities and endless strip malls advertising the baby clothes and automotive parts and Laundromats and cavernous supermarkets offering everything and nothing. At the end of the line she would be waiting for him.
As a child she was so wanting, and now she’d grown into a woman not at all his type: tall, meandering, wistful, always meaning something she could never say. She wore the same dress year after year, thinking it something special. A pitiful girl. An even more pitiful woman. Seven years now he’d made the trip—seven, an unlucky number. Yet here he was, on his way. Here he was.
Those being the disadvantages. What was good about traveling to the North was that Rhonda had a house all to herself, unlike the women he knew at home. Not a room, not an apartment in a city project, but a real single-family house with many rooms in which to fuck. No matter it looked like a box, all fenced in by the same Adirondack posts everyone else had, or that by twilight her roof was indistinguishable from the rest of the land. This woman didn’t answer to nobody. She didn’t have to cook or clean if she didn’t feel like it; there were no obligatory greens pots simmering on the stove, no tobacco-stained clothes waiting in wicker baskets. It was so different from Auntsville, with its large dilapidated faux-antebellum homes, wringers, double-wides, televangelists blaring trumpets. There were no memories on Long Island. Here Rhonda and Billy were new and improved; they could make love until the early hours of sun and never worry about angry lovers barging in, or incapacitated relatives. He and Rhonda (a woman normally too alpine for his taste) could sit naked at the table and nibble chests, breasts, toes, and elbows, ripened bodies instead of the usual coffee, butter, and grits they had grown up on.
This night, Billy Merry had a plan. He felt stung by ambition as he drove the highway, thinking of the plan in all its glory. And this was his plan: that seven years would end tonight. It was time to learn from the past.
Billy gripped the steering wheel in fury, and relief—even though the past was a million miles away, and now he was not just some ignorant boy in the field. He had been deciding what to do for quite a while.
How funny that all roads eventually lead to Asenath Fowler!
Rheumy eyes, arms and legs resembling spiderwebs, a time-worn mouth tasting of cinnamon and juniper bark. Time to learn.
She was an old woman back when there were hundreds of beauties in Auntsville, thousands even, lining up to his door. Nothing more than a scarf of skin, or a heart that beat like an African drum. Why had he listened to her? Why had he even trusted her? But then you would have to ask: Why does moss grow on the north side of trees? Why is the earth at the center of the universe?
Outside the snow fell in soft pillows of sky around him. He stared ahead at the highway, whispering to the windshield,—Rhonda. Rhonda. It is time to learn from the past.
The woman waiting in the house, however, was ignorant of his ideas. She did not hear his whispers from the Belt Parkway or see the particular arrangement of clouds in the night sky. She was sewing, breathing, conceiving, reconceiving, imagining, reimagining; but ignorant, all the same. She knew she was in love, but unfortunately could not read the signs overhead, heavenly signs that admonished her for sewing that dress again and that informed her that tonight, Billy Merry was planning on leaving her for the woman of his dreams.
She picked up her dress and resumed sewing. If only he were here already. At the door, she would immediately rise out of the doldrums which had all that month whispered to her: Ain’t Christmas a family holiday? Ain’t you supposed to have some turkey wings, some biscuits in the fry pan? Where your real people? A man alone is not real people.
Her thoughts turned to yesterday, the last day of school: the silence of the hallways as the aged janitor glided his sweeper across the floors; Rhonda standing at the school entrance, waiting for the last child to leave the building. When she went back to comb the rooms for leftover children, she noticed the clock in Mr. Wool’s classroom, and the indecent way it hung over the map of the United States, almost insulting her with its arcane ticking. (What was it trying to tell her?) The janitor had entered the room and surprised her by pushing a potted Christmas cactus in her direction. —Moo moo, he seemed to say to her, only she couldn’t understand his country talk. —Moo moo. Moo.
What was the message? Rhonda took the cactus and pulled her coat tightly around her shoulders. The old man had already acted the fool in the yard that afternoon—now what did he want?
As he got ready to open his mouth again, she quickly wished him a Merry Christmas and left the building.
The old man fell into a rusted folding chair by the door and watched as she walked away. During the day she was in his thoughts as he pushed his broom down the school hallway, or as he swept away gum wrappers and coils of lint and hair, or as he poured a scalding bucket over vomit or a lake of urine, or as he locked and unlocked his myriad cabinets. He had seen many a pretty teacher come and go at Featherstone, but had never met anyone as gainly as Miss Robinson.
Earlier that day, the last before Christmas vacation, he’d found her during cafeteria and cornered her with babble, a stream of something unfocused and heady, but incredibly lovely (he imagined) to listen to. He suddenly adored the sound of his own voice, so deep and baritone. Mr. Blank talked about children because he knew that women were always impressed by men with feeling. He talked and talked—an amazing baritone! (Why hadn’t he noticed it before?) Often he’d lain in bed, chirping wildly like the birds on the suet. It was only on that day before Christmas vacation, however, that he had become aware of his depths.
It was all quite natural. As he spoke, he thought about the way her breasts would taste in his unencumbered mouth, and how he would love to see her in that pink-and-black gingham just to erase (by hand) the seams that had been crudely stitched and opened and restitched together. He was an old man but he still could make a girl scream; it hadn’t happened that way in years (or maybe it had never happened, he couldn’t be sure), but something in him, a distant memory of prowess, convinced him of the possibilities of lust that has layered over time.
Through a thicket of words, Mr. Blank found himself admitting to Rhonda that though he’d had his share of grief, it was now time to move on. Keep on keeping on, as the young say. In truth, he rarely thought about his former grief: the gang of unloving kids he had raised, his wife, eternally grim. All of them had left him long ago. Now what remained was to push his broom, clean up after the schoolchildren (bless their nasty little hearts), and watch the teachers come and go. Never anyone as gainlyas her.
Mr. Blank stopped speaking, and suddenly wondered where he was. His memory sometimes played tricks.
Rhonda Robinson was frowning at him, a deep (but possibly ecstatic) frown. The janitor sank to his knees in the cafeteria; everyone turned and looked. He focused on Rhonda Robinson’s legs as though they were the first he had ever seen in his life. Round, slightly knobbed, caramel colored, drenched in pantyhose.
—Rhonda, he suddenly said. —Oh. Oh.
—Mr. Blank, please!
He took her hand. —Please hear what I’m saying, he whispered. —I want to feel you, Miss Robinson, it’s this dream I have. He could not finish his thought, his sentence. Like the birds on the suet.
Rhonda opened her mouth to say something (he knew it would be harsh, but looked forward to it) and then stormed off, leaving the old man floundering in a pool of children’s giggles. He rose slowly and planned his next course of action.
The house on Long Island had belonged to her grandmother when she came up north, and then the old woman sold it to Rhonda and went to live in a nursing home called the Plantation. It was just down the road in East Amity, but the granddaughter was never seen visiting.
Billy, too, rarely made inquiries about Asenath when he came up. He never even mentioned her by name—until this night, he believed the past should remain in the past. He knew, however, that treachery was ugly; that it made you as alone as a dog tied to a tree, cooling the body into parched red earth. When he was with Rhonda, and when he was in that sort of mood, he referred to her grandmother as the old woman, the battle-ax, the crazy bitch. They laughed. They rolled on a bed and then onto the floor and then down the hallway and down the stairs past the slipcovered couch. They grew splinters in the dark knots of their bodies, chestnut locks, and undone frizz. Nothing but laughter.
(Why had he been so stupid for so many years? It seemed a veritable lifetime.)
Billy eventually drifted off to a shoulder. He closed his eyes (a reckless thing to do on the Southern State Parkway, especially on Christmas Eve) and he wept. Treachery was akin to death.
In life she had been different from anything he had ever known. Arthritic, camphorate, and yet bold: She wore an old-fashioned floor-length dress and stood in the elbow of the afternoon sun, waving her long apron in the dust. The neck hole of the dress was so large he could see her brown shoulders slip out from time to time. A stark scent of onion and allspice wafted up from the pleats of her skirt; one day he and she were out on the street, just a stone’s throw from the school, and he inhaled that skirt. He wanted desperately to touch the old woman but could not believe she wanted the same.
Now disguised as a spirit, or something the old folks liked to believe in, she arrived most inconveniently in his thoughts, slipping into the unheated car, hushing him; he acquiesced. With a hand like a veil she agitated him gently in his privates, forcing him to put his hand up to his left breast right there in the car and start rubbing underneath his faux-silk shirt and bay rum.
—One thing for sure, Billy murmured,—Women do not grow shoulders like that anymore.
Minutes later he slackened the grip on his skin, started the engine, and continued the road to Rhonda. She was waiting for him, and like it or not, there was precious little you could deny a woman in wait.
She had waited him for years, ever since the fifth grade when his name was changed from Billy to Shame-Billy on account of his impetuous and horrifying need to smear his lips over the backs and fronts of the flat-chested girls in Miss Fauset’s classroom. He used his hands like vise grips, crushing crinolines and doily collars, finding the place where the skin salted the tongue. In the cloakroom he trampled the girls as they ran to and from him. The sugar-snap breast buds burst as he tried to pry them off bodies. Screams, hollering: and once a pretty girl who split her head on the sharp wooden molding. Somewhere in his trousers, the shadow of a miniature boy-bulge appeared.
—Shame! Shame-Billy! the girls cried, all of them scurrying to the other side of the room, laughing in the terrified pitch of sparrows. Billy Merry usually came to and stood by himself, on the verge of tears, not understanding his feelings or the haze that had overtaken him. The boys in his class—ages ten and eleven and twelve—broke a few of his bones. The girls went home and complained to their mothers that he was possessed by the devil; that witches used him to do their voodoo, to capture people in spells, to work their roots on innocent souls.
He never once, however, approached Rhonda with his lips. She watched and waited in a corner of the classroom, sitting on upturned palms, but nothing happened. Once he accidentally tapped the bottom of her buttocks, and in a flurry she threw herself on top of him, flailing her arms and her breasts, which looked and moved like a woman’s breasts. After that spectacle, the girls refused to let her near their circle and the boys threatened to break her bones as well, saying —You ain’t normal, shame-girl! Miss Fauset expelled Rhonda from school for wanton acts.
His face took to appearing to her in her dreams, in meadows and forests, in the large vegetable garden at her grand-mother’s house, on swampy clouds that floated to nowhere. Ironing and starching clothes, sewing buttons back on shirts and darning socks; canning pears and peaches and peas and then preparing the pots for supper; squeezing lemons by hand because that was the best way to make lemonade. Pouring the sugar out grain by grain. She would feel his lips on her flat front, stinging her with desire. (Hunger is a potion, as the old folks say.) One time she lapsed into a dream of Billy only to awaken to a brash whipping by her grandmother, who—annoyed by the moans and words her baby used (and so incorrectly!)—smacked the girl’s head, and consequently, the boy from it as well.
—There is a right way and a wrong way, Asenath explained to the girl. —Things you are not ready for.
—What is the right way? Rhonda asked.
—Do any of us really know? the grandmother cried, whipping harder.
But later, as her granddaughter whimpered to herself alone, Asenath Fowler found herself standing outside the school building. The children had long since dissipated. She stood dressed in her church clothes, a sprig of camellia hanging above her breasts. She saw Shame-Billy emerge from the building and called him over. —Are you the boy who thinks he is a man? she asked.
Billy did not lift his eyes.
—Well, Asenath said, looking him up and down, —Come here and talk to me. Let me try to put you right.
The clock moved from six to seven to seven-thirty; startling certainty at each slam of a car door, but it was never him. Late, too late. The dress was finished, laid on her bed for the last-minute rush, but then she got up and threw it on hastily, careful with the zipper. She hadn’t had a chance to do her hair, but that could be taken care of in a flash—she kept the curling iron hot in the bathroom. In the next room, the exact place where others on North Moss Drive housed children and oversize dressers, Rhonda moved to a small vanity table and began to paint her nails. Coral Mirage, to match her house, her dress, her underwear. As she spread out her fingers she imagined his hands: broad brown, the color of a wheelbarrow full of dirt, hands creased with motor oil that the detergent had not been able to remove. Sun, dirt, motor oil, detergent, musk. Onion, clove, maybe lemon. His face would be, as ever, handsomely unlined, though he spent most of his days in the tobacco.
He was too late. Eight o’clock. Tobacco did not grow in the winter—why wasn’t he here yet? Men did not disappear into thin air for no reason.
The snow was blinding; he’d heard the weather report just that afternoon, during which springlike temperatures had foolishly been predicted. Everywhere around him cars lay frozen, stalled, or in damaged heaps. He glanced at his wristwatch, knowing she would be impatient, likely to burst the moment he drove up. He could read her like a clock on the wall.
He had followed Rhonda north after she left seven years ago, but why? He couldn’t tell you. Initially she had seemed surprised to see him standing there at her door, so far from Auntsville. She seemed surprised to learn that he had been thinking of her all these years, and giggled girlishly at his lust. She made some offhand remark about him only caring for her old grandma, to which he laughed, and she laughed as well. Silly ideas clouding a girl’s head. Now a woman. (Legs, breasts grown into splashing hills, buttocks that could be construed as roomy and tight at the same time.) And yes, she had thought of him, too.
He promised to visit her the very next Christmas, and the one after that. From Auntsville he sent Rhonda parcels of ladies’ undergarments, large bottles of inexpensive eau de toilette, long-stemmed matches, occasional dirty magazines, and locks of his curly chestnut hair (a white person’s hair, but sexy nonetheless). From there on in, he was awash in her love.
Once in a great while, when he was in that sort of mood, Billy Merry would ask about the old woman. The old battle-ax. Just out of curiosity, of course.
Rhonda would laugh at him. —Why you care about her? She just fine where she is.
Tears forming in both their eyes. And that was the end of that.
She’d gotten in the habit of speaking to him every day as he left the school, lying in wait like the Trojan Horse. As he rounded the corner, she would call out, —Where you taking all those kisses, boy?
Long ago. In the garden behind her house, in the tangle of catbrier, in the shade of a wisteria hung over a rickety scaffolding, the old woman guided the boy’s hands around her waist and explained to him the importance of courting girls instead of scaring them away. She had heard things about him—no matter. This was how it was done.
Her voice soft and treacly, her waist as vast as a rainwater barrel. He found he had to get even closer to encircle the old woman, closer than was proper, and when he looked up, she was smiling greedily into his face.
—This is the way. This is the start. You don’t want them to run from you. You want them to want you.
Nine o’clock. Normally she would say to herself: Nothing new to this; all men are late. Normally she would admit to herself that all they really cared about was some things, never other things. They never thought about your wishes, your desire to break free from a thing unseen or unheard.
Rhonda walked past the Chinese partition separating the vanity from a brass-and-leather wet bar and poured herself a tumbler of Bristol Cream. She glanced out the window: nothing, only the shapes of two children, girls possibly, dashing across the yard, knocking over her only potted plant. From the left corner of the sky, an owl flitted back and forth between two elderberry trees. The owl, she remembered from her grand-mother’s day, was sign of trouble. Rhonda held her breath; there was definitely something wrong with this lateness.
Her job at Featherstone Elementary and Middle Schools was dull, but she loved to look at the children and secretly open their textbooks as they played and hit on each other. Sasha Devine, the little mixed girl, carried Leaves of Grass around with her everywhere and sometimes recited,
When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d…. And thought of him I love.
Plain silly. Mozelle Mountain, the other mixed girl (part Indian she claimed), stuck her nose in a book called Confederate Spies and Soldiers. Stupid girl, stupid book. Harriet-Ann Hutchinson, a full-blooded colored girl, carried The Dawn of Our World in her book bag, but it was clear that the pages had never really been turned. Why hadn’t the stupid girl realized the beauty of those Greek men? They were practically edible! Rhonda shook her head in dismay. She knew a few of their names: Homer, Eurydice, Cupid, Rex. She searched her mind for the details, but nothing came up. It was so long ago, and Miss Fauset had thrown her out like a piece of garbage.
After recess was over and the bell summoned the children inside, Rhonda would sit in the sun—no matter how cold or how softly the snow fell—and bask a few minutes before returning to the hallway. This small space of time outdoors in the yard was like home, where oftentimes the stark North Carolina sun had been her only real company. The companion of her secret.
She had seen her grandmother take Shame-Billy into the garden and remove his trousers behind the blackberry thicket. The woman traveled the boy’s hand along her breast, stopping at the nipple, encircling the massive dark space there.—You’re all mine, the old woman had said.
Rhonda had witnessed this, the boy writhing in pleasure, a brief period of exploration and gasps, after which the pair of them, thick as thieves, stoically marched up to the house and returned to the garden carrying jars of lemonade. Rhonda had seen this. She had seen naked butts, breasts, arms, necks, tongues; braids and curls undone. Then a tall jar of lemonade, sides beading with sweat, the contents sometimes disappearing in one monstrous gulp.
In the yard the janitor would occasionally push his ash can on wheels over in Rhonda’s direction. He would stand in the way of her light, darkening her awake, then make a simple joke about the weather or the misdeeds of the children. Sometimes his words contained faint praise.
—Say Miss Rhonda, the janitor would begin.—You looking pretty good there. You looking like you taking care of business. I know. I do the same myself.
(He knew he was the only one who ever talked to her because to his mind the rest of the teachers were uppity and the principal was a fag; that left him as the only person to appreciate the glory of Miss Rhonda Robinson. He was old as the hills and until now did not think anything of removing his teeth from his overall pocket and casually setting them in his head during conversation. The children made fun of him, leaving nasty notes on blackboards for him to read. He shrugged his shoulder: Hadn’t his own kids behaved the selfsame way? Hadn’t they called him narrow and dirty, all run away from home in bits and pieces—but that was years and years ago, and nowadays he was even having trouble remembering their names, the years in which they had been born, or even the shapes of their heads.)
Mr. Blank approached Miss Robinson on ash-can wheels.—Hey there, Miss Rhonda, he said.
—Hey there, Mr. Blank, Rhonda replied blandly, watching the children scatter around her.—How you?
—Can’t complain, he answered. He held his lips tightly over his teeth.—Kids been treating you right?
—Same as ever.
—You ever think of having any of your own, Miss Rhonda? You’d make a fine woman.
(He’d meant to say mother. Mr. Blank kicked himself for this mistake.)
Rhonda nodded demurely; she too noticed what he’d said. He wouldn’t have said it if he had seen her last Christmas Eve. In fact, his eyes would have popped out of his head if he’d seen the things she and Billy did together. Old man don’t know his dick from his thumb. She turned and walked away.
That night, Mr. Blank took his dreams about Rhonda to bed. He was still a young man, if you counted desire as proof.
He folded his withered hands in prayer, just like his wife of long ago had taught him, only now he did not pray to Jesus or to the Lord Most High but to a caramel woman with large knees; he prayed to her loud fruity perfume and its spell over her shoulders; to the daisy shape of her mouth; to the way she did up her hair in two braided buns on the side of her head like women from the old days. He prayed to the volume of her behind as she switched down the hallways, shooing children to class. He prayed to the big words she used, the airs she put on, the way she smiled at the girls, maternal. He prayed to clothes, in particular to the black-and-pink gingham dress, the one that she had obviously sewn down to look more matronly, only for him it was obvious that you could let out a seam here and there and be pleasantly surprised. She was the stuff of dreams.
—Lord, let me not want, he prayed, before falling asleep.
Back in Auntsville, the meetings between the two lovers had been confined to the vegetable garden in the swarm of a late-afternoon sun, ticklish groping and instruction until ritual lemonade. She knew boys his age loved to drink, just as they loved tearing apart insects and running stolen cars and burying them in the field. This one was different, though; he barely touched the jar.
She sat next to him on the porch swing, where he did not think about insects or lemonade but about how he had just embraced her, how they had lain across vines of sugar-snap peas and moaned in unison. He had never heard voices travel at the same time, and found it bewitching. She’d allowed his tongue in her mouth as they sat amid rows of strawberries, a romantic touch. Through her dress, he massaged the womanly triangle between her legs while she dug her fingers into the earth, upsetting the birth of radish, carrot, and white sweet potato. She was not like the others. She did not scream, she did not harm his body or cause a haze to cover his eyes like a cobweb.
He wanted to go on, but she eventually stopped him, the sun hanging like a grapefruit in the sky. Like the other times, they did not make love. He was a child after all, she reasoned. She only wanted him to know what to do when the time came; said she was tired of girls being afraid of what they really wanted—soon he would become teacher. Just think of this as a sort of practice run.
But he did not want to practice forever. He wanted the seasoning of oldness; in his heart he imagined the heat of something undone and unraveling. He took her in his arms on the porch and uttered the words,—I love you.
Strangely, she shunned him.
Love was not for an old woman with things to teach. She demanded he notice her hips, her thighs, the way her breasts did not sag like other old women’s. That he should look and dream; that he should measure up to her imagination; that he should not ask for earth when moon and stars danced in front of his nose. That he should not fall in love.
—Look at my granddaughter Rhonda, Asenath had told him then, wiping away his tears.—Rhonda is a person you can love. She is not like me at all.
Late in the afternoon on the last day of school, Mr. Blank had pushed his broom up to the teachers’ lounge and watched Rhonda eat her sandwich: fried chicken cutlet on hero bread, two large sweet pickles, a container of vanilla pudding. He moved extra slow, emptying the wastebaskets and clapping the erasers clean, touching the teachers’ coats, straightening arms and lapels. She gulped coffee from a thermos and licked her lips like a cat. Mr. Blank checked the wastebaskets again.
He longed to pass Miss Rhonda and touch her on the cheek. To roll his ash can her way and kiss the velvet off her skin. An act of solidarity: He and she were terribly alone here. They were not teachers. They had no children. They withdrew themselves in dreams, he was sure.
Rhonda Robinson wearily glanced at him, then got up to adjust her dress in the mirror.
All he’d really wanted was a taste of Rhonda’s hand. A confirmation.
Mr. Blank went outside the lounge and waited until she miraculously appeared; he walked her to the gymnasium. She was supposed to help line up the colored kids to be tested for sickle cell, help stop the little ones from crying at the sight of the needle. Mr. Blank told her he admired such kindness in a person.
—I wouldn’t want to know if I was going to die tomorrow, he said.—I always just want to make the most of my days.
—These are little kids, Rhonda replied, annoyed.—They can’t make those decisions for themselves.
—Still, he continued,—I wouldn’t want to know. I’d want to live my life in the best way possible. Don’t you agree, Miss Rhonda?
—Who wouldn’t want to live their life in the best way? she snapped, opening the door to the gym. Then added,—You know, you remind me of someone.
—Miss Rhonda! he interrupted, alarmed that he should actually be in her thoughts. This was too much.—There’s something I need to tell you in person!
But it was too late. Rhonda had already walked into the throngs of frightened children and once more left Mr. Blank behind.
The snow had simmered to almost nothing once Billy reached the exit to West Amity on the Southern State Parkway. Oddly, a warmth filled the car, a warmth as damp and spongy as spring air. He had to keep his eyes open for the bright pink house. A shame to ruin a perfectly good house with that color, but what was that his business? The girl had something strange and permanent against her grandmother, but don’t ask him.
Shame-Billy pulled the car into the driveway; no Rhonda. He waited.
(At their last meeting, when he was fifteen, Asenath had poked her tongue in and out of his ear, sparking his juices into electricity, but again at the word love, she recoiled. There was a warning. If he spoke it again, she would take another boy under her wing. If he spoke it again, she would lock the gate to her vegetables—forever. What was the purpose in loving, anyway? He had his whole life ahead of him. And she would be leaving for Long Island sometime soon, to the place where a body could get a regular house, not some old run-down thing.)
He went through the list in his mind. How he decided to call her bluff. How she’d finally left Auntsville for Long Island in what seemed to him to be the middle of the night. How he’d cried. How she had left him with only the scent of cloves and onion on his hands. How he hated the scent of betrayal.
How he took any and every woman who walked by him and ravished them with his new skills. How he broke hearts. The list continued: How he sent letters to a phantom address called the Plantation and when he received no reply, how he humped one girl after the other in vengeance. How he moved about aimlessly until about seven years ago, when, retribution in mind, he left for Long Island, only to have things change.
He’d vigorously sought out Rhonda, but at her door the first time discovered that the years had softened him. Add to that a house to practically call his own and a woman who answered the door, genuinely happy to see him. A loving woman, a receptive woman, one who would do just about anything at the drop of a hat. Did not trouble him with the word love but would walk on all fours or lie still as a dead person. Things had a way of metamorphosing, like a worm into a butterfly. A garden of sheer delights.
In the car he sat alone and waited. Seven years would end tonight. In the morning he and Rhonda would go and find her grandmother. Seven years had gone by without so much as a mention of her full name: Asenath Gertrude Fowler—how ungrateful! To Rhonda he had only called her the old woman, the bag of bones, the battle-ax. The crazy bitch. Now his heart shattered at its cruelty.
The lights were on everywhere in the house. Slowly, Billy Merry left the car and walked up the path to the front door.
Minutes before that, Rhonda had fallen into the chair in front of the vanity mirror. —Gone, she said to herself, —gone.
There was no answer to her tears, no legend or inscription on the rock-hardness of her memory, no unearthed instruction to forgive and forget—and the fact of that absence only made her cry harder.
Sitting on the corner of his bed, ready to spring into action, Mr. Blank was overcome by the faintest aromas of memory and fell backward on the mattress —Lord, give me strength, he mumbled, only the words came out like cattle’s lowing. He put his head in his hands. —My children! he cried.
Why was he alone? Why couldn’t he remember them? Everything had backfired, all the lessons and whippings and misguided attempts at feeling; sitting in a corner, in a closet, no light, too much light. Year by year they had all left the house, especially the girls, telling him he was incapable of love, warning him to stay far away. The boys learned to disavow his existence.
He wept. Rhonda Robinson would understand things differently. She would applaud his intentions—only just then he was not completely sure Rhonda wasn’t one of his own. Hadn’t he raised a girl like her, with legs shaped like vines? Hadn’t he seen lips like Rhonda’s in his house for years? Where?
Hadn’t someone screamed at him because he loved too much? Or not enough? Where were they all?
Flat on the bed, he was convinced of the possibilities of life and of death, of sin and forgiveness, the power of lust that had layered, one night superimposing the next, for years and years and years, world without end. Desire had never abandoned him, had never left him or his dreams for dead.
And so, later that night, Mr. Blank found himself at Sixty-six North Moss Drive, in front of Rhonda Robinson’s house. At the far end of the cul-de-sac he saw a car slowly edging its way on the road and knew instinctively that the car was moving toward the pink house. He stepped into a hedge of holly and waited.
Somewhere an owl whispered in the branches. A tiny voice scolded, making him tear his hand along the edge of a leaf. The car pulled into the driveway: a man at its helm. The tiny voice scolded again, and he recognized this as the voice of his wife, long gone. She was advising him to remember himself.
—No one can work miracles, she admonished, then faded into the holly in his hand.
After some time Billy Merry forced open the front door and found Rhonda curled in a ball by the stove. He unpeeled her gently and placed her in a kitchen chair. He asked her what was wrong.
—My grandma, she murmured.—I just got the call. She died tonight at the Plantation.
He winced, but not too visibly. Gone. He lifted the fainted Rhonda upstairs to the bedroom, passing the familiar slipcovered couch and splintered stair railing. Only after he lay her on the bed did she awaken and recall what this evening was supposed to hold.
—I can’t do none of that! she shouted, bolting upright. (She remembered the curl of his hair, the way he resembled a Greek statue: Homer, Oedipus, Cupid!)—No! none of that now, please!
Billy gently motioned her to lie down; all that was far from his mind.
After fixing a wet rag on her forehead, he went into the other room and sat at the vanity. Minutes later he got up, fixed himself a drink, and took off his coat. Seven years had ended sooner than he’d imagined.
In the confines of the holly hedge, warm air lifting the night into Bethlehem, Mr. Blank undid his coat, slipped off the tie he had sloppily fastened to his neck, unbuttoned his best work shirt, and exposed his nubbed chest to the air.—If she wants me, she’ll have me, he announced to the owl-less tree.
He looked up at what he thought was her window—beyond it, he envisioned a soft canopied bed and a pair of porcelain ballerina slippers atop an oak bureau. Time would pass; an apple cobbler would burn in the oven. Time would pass. He saw a woman squatting over him as if he were a bath of warm mud, moaning in pleasure, rolling her eyes to the back of her head.
He continued undressing, despite the chill and rustle of the hedge. He did not want her to come out and laugh at him. And yet, he could not help sending her this vision.
—What took you so long? his wife whispered from his hand.—This woman’s been here forever, seems.
He shivered. He was almost naked.
—You don’t need to ask about me, she continued.—Time heals all wounds. Even I forgive you for looking the other way.
—What do that mean? he asked.
—I was your wife, she answered.—I was the chance you had, but you looked the other way, time after time.
—Now is not the place for all that, he snarled.
—It always has a place, she sighed.—I was there forever, too.
So there was no real reason to keep on coming here anymore, now, was there?
Billy looked at Rhonda in the bed and searched her face, her ears, her nape. He did not like the fall of her tears; they sounded like something he hated to hear in people, in women: loss.
What would loving be like after tonight? Asenath was gone. What was the purpose?
Billy poured himself another tumbler of Bristol Cream and walked back to the bed where Rhonda lay whimpering under a flutter of vanilla sheets. On her dress, the zipper had split itself from the fabric, exposing thousands of tiny threads that wiggled in the open like worms, revealing her large smooth back and the soft length of vertebrae; her shoulders.
He pictured the earth of the garden underneath his feet, the pebbles and soil and secret waterways, and, somewhere in the distance, a pot simmering on the stove. A pitcher of undrunk lemonade. Cloves and onions. His name had never really been Shame-Billy. It had always been Bill. William. My Lover.
He stretched himself out next to Rhonda. Downstairs the doorbell rang, but neither of them seemed to hear it. He reached over to her head and began smoothing the undone hair. Then he laid his hand on her neck.—There, there, baby, he said.—I love you.
She turned to face him. Behind her, the night sky full of the perfume of a dying winter.
—Tell me was it enough! she cried, squared to his face, the first time.—Tell me: Will it ever be enough?
The room settled with quiet. He stared back into Rhonda’s eyes, searching for the remainder of the evening, for the remainder of his life with this woman, the inevitability of box living combined with the inevitability of love, the mud tracks out of the garden and onto the asphalt, but just then the doorbell rang again and woke him and Rhonda from their dreams.
—Why am I changing? Asenath asked herself in bed earlier that evening. The clock had just rung seven.
Christmas Eve—the time of Love and Bounty and Family, only here she was—alone. For days she’d had the taste for garden dirt and for sun-streaked skin against her mouth, but her mind had abandoned her, making it impossible to properly sort out people and places. She threw off her blankets; outside there was nothing but an unusually balmy wind. The other women in the Plantation had stopped in her room to say good night, then turned their faces and wept. Someone gloomily asked if she wanted her Bible.
All her life she had dreamed of coming up north and leaving behind the beautiful and oppressive sunsets of North Carolina. All her life.
Now, prone in bed, all she could do was yearn for those skies; for heat and large gardens and busy kitchens and rundown houses and long gospel gowns that swept the floor. Back in Auntsville she had done many things—she had known a boy in the rows of her vegetables and herbs. Where was he now? Why had she turned him away? He fit neatly into a box of her design, but where? Here in Long Island her insides had withered to nothing.
And no, she did not want no Bible. Could someone instead please get that box of letters from the bottom of her closet? She’d read them years before, never answering a one. Now was the time.
From the crack in her windowpane, Asenath felt a startling trace of warmth in the air. She thought about Rhonda Robinson, saw her granddaughter scratching furiously at her flat chest, trying to get at something. (All wrong, all wrong. Wake up girl! Let me show you how. Let me come near you.)
She asked aloud, —Are you still having those dreams?