AS STELLA WALKED UP THE RED CLAY, STONE-STUDDED driveway to the back door of her aunts’ home, Pal let out one deep bark from the shadows, recognized her, snuffed her leg, wagged his tail. Stella always spoke to nice dogs as if they were people—“How you?”—and ignored rude ones, like Goliath, as much as she could without seeming rude herself. When she went through the kitchen door, Pal slipped in with her.
Her aunt greeted the dog first. “I’m in here, Pal.”
Aunt Krit sat grading math papers at the dining room table, but she laid down the pencil, red on one end and blue on the other, to claim Pal. She stroked his head with both hands, slender beautiful hands (Stella had inherited her hands from her Aunt Krit), saying over and over, “Poor Pal, poor Pal. You like to been brown, didn’t you?”Like to been? She meant the dog only lacked a little bit of being brown. Actually Pal was pure white. He had an indistinct shading of pale tan over the top of his head.
To Stella, Krit said, “I don’t like you out walking the street so late at night.”
“It’s summer. Lots of people are out late. It’s only a mile.”
“They’ve gone to bed.” She nodded her head at the parallel house across the driveway.
The Gulf of Driveway! When Stella was little, it had been scary to cross the driveway at night; her father used to send her over with codeine tablets wrapped in a Kleenex to calm the nerves of Aunt Pratt. As soon as Stella entered the kitchen, Aunt Krit intercepted Aunt Pratt’s medicine. A razor blade lay on the kitchen table. Aunt Krit sat down, unwrapped the tablets, and shaved off their sides. One whole tablet was confiscated. She doesn’t need all this. It had never occurred to Stella to tell her father that Aunt Krit always reduced Pratt’s dosage. Maybe he had guessed it. Maybe he sent too much because he knew Krit would interfere.
“Over there, they all went to bed an hour ago.”They were the new owners who had bought Stella’s home.
As though to contradict Aunt Krit, the kitchen light came on in the bedded-down house.
“It’s a nice summer night,” Stella said. “Except for the heat. I didn’t feel a bit afraid.”
“Boodle-worm.”
Stella lifted out the chair at the end of the table—You lift, don’t drag, fine furniture—and sat down companionably. Sometimes, truth told, Stella did feel afraid alone at night, but not after she’d acted righteously or done a good deed. Not after she’d been with Cat;after that, as she walked away, she stretched and luxuriated in her mobility. It felt so fine to walk that sometimes, when she was out of sight, she flew down the sidewalk. How would it be to work at Miles?
Pal sat down between Krit and Stella; he panted and stuck his penis out of its white furry sheath. The dog’s penis fascinated Stella: bright pink, a distinct tip, tiny red blood vessels visible along its sides. Pal was bored. He nudged his chin onto her thigh, and she dutifully petted him. He wanted attention; affection was superfluous. Pal had short legs but a long back with a part down the middle and wiry white hair falling to either side. Stella ran her finger down the part to make his skin flicker and shudder.
“You want to help me grade a set?” Aunt Krit slid a rubber band off a stack of papers folded lengthwise; she stored the thin rubber band with two others on her wrist, like bangle bracelets. This was the first summer Aunt Krit had taught summer school. I want to see what it’s like, she’d said, for the money.
She’d quickly decided she didn’t like it.
They graded quietly. Aunt Krit’s eyes could glance at a math paper and flag the slightest error; she didn’t need to think about it;her eyes just lighted on the flaws:I’m like a duck on a june bug, she had said once to Stella, and Krit had smiled a wry, shy, crooked smile, her face shining with pride. Stella loved that rare smile: Aunt Krit pleased.
“ ’Nother goose egg!” Aunt Krit drew the red zero and sighed. “They’re all nothing but failures and future criminals!”
If Aunt Krit liked a student, she marked his paper in blue; if she didn’t, she used red; both colors were available at opposite ends of the pencil. For summer school students, she used only the red end of the pencil. After algebra, they began to grade geometry papers. “They’re all headed for the penitentiary,” Aunt Krit said indignantly.
Krit was thin and frail, always tired, never seemed strong or thoroughly happy. She disapproved of Aunt Pratt, blessedly asleep in her own bedroom, an invalid to arthritis and an accident that had ruined her knee. But Pratt had been derailed earlier; when Son—Pratt’s grown boy—had been drafted into World War II and then had gone AWOL, Pratt lived with the constant fear he’d be caught and shot as a deserter. Her work was to worry, but she did it in solitude. Her deceased husband’s pension supplied her few needs—for nail polish and perfume. When she had company, she sociably attended to her guest, offered gum or hard candy.
Krit couldn’t stand Pratt’s perfumes and powders and eyebrow pencils; her gaudy earrings, necklaces, and bracelets; her box of silly flowered scarfs, her endless packs of chewing gum (for Stella), her bright red belts and matching shoes. All day Pratt drew pictures, crocheted, and told stories to whoever came through the door. Didn’t earn a dime.
Aunt Krit’s favorite color was blue. She only wore skirts in shades of blue and beige, topped by a neat white blouse, sometimes with a little embroidery on the collar. The blouses hung straight from her shoulders to her waist. Even in her nightgown—sheer red nylon—Aunt Pratt, thin as Aunt Krit, sometimes wore her brassiere plumped up with thick sponge breasts.
Krit tossed down her grading pencil and declared, “Even if Don is Cat’s brother, it would ruin the wedding to have her in it.”
Stella said nothing.
“You don’t have to have her.”
“But Don wants her to stand up for us.”
“Stand up!”
“Be in the wedding.”
“At a wedding everything’s got to be perfect. They delivered the rosebushes today. I’ll have Old Uncle put them in tomorrow.”
“They’ll look great.”
“I want it to be perfect. I’m inviting all the teachers.”
Krit envisioned the whole backyard walled with white climbing roses in full bloom. The new rosebushes had two seasons to grow because Don had postponed everything and gone off to some dark island for the Peace Corps. “Boodle-worm,” Aunt Krit muttered under her breath. She knew Don might never come back to marry her niece. Like that Darl. Out of the picture. Krit had never trusted Darl, his face hidden under all those specks. But Don was as fair and unblemished as somebody you could see on the screen. She liked him. He was like Alan Ladd crossed with Rock Hudson. Why did young people go off in the Peace Corps unless they were running away from something at home?
For a while, Krit and Stella returned to their grading. Finally Aunt Krit threw down her pencil again, took off her pale-rimmed glasses, and rubbed her eyes. “I don’t believe I can grade another paper.”
Stella looked at her and smiled. “Let’s hit the hay.”
Krit wished her niece wouldn’t use slang. “Let me show you something.”
Aunt Krit picked up a sheet of graph paper. With the straight edge and blue pencil, she divided it into quadrants. In two opposing quadrants, she drew opposing hyperboles till the widening flanges fell off the page. The blue-line hyperboles looked like two fish, nose to nose. “Now this one,” Krit said, “is really the same as this one. It’s gone through all time and space and come back.” Her voice choked on the enormity of it. “While it travels, it gets closer and closer to the straight lines, but the hyperbola’s lines will never become straight and never touch the asymptotes. The hyperbola draws infinitely closer.” She sighed and touched the crosspoint of the coordinates with her blue pencil lead. “This spot, this place is God.”
Then she set down the pencil, shot a meaningful glance at her niece, and went to bed. Aunt Pratt had been snoring from her bedroom all evening. Not a care or a question in her head.
After Krit climbed into the high bed, she always communed first with her dead mother, whose last illness with pneumonia and death had occurred in that same narrow hospital bed. To comfort herself and signal their union, Krit pressed her body into the mattress where Mama had lain. If we stayed in Crenshaw County at Helicon, none of this would have happened.
Krit let herself drift back to childhood, back to South Alabama, when they’d all been together and no one had seen an automobile. World War I was still in the future. Sometimes Krit had ridden with Jenny, her friend from down the road, in her pony cart. Jenny’s hair, the color of taffy candy, was always caught up by a blue satin ribbon and hung in perfect long sausage curls down her back. Time to drift on back to when they’d all been happy. Someday I’ll have to tell the colored people to move out of my house.
IN PRATT’S DREAMING HEAD, bombs exploded—World War II—and she feared her only son had been caught by the army, sent to the front lines, might be hurt or dying! Son! Son! And then his face under the helmet changed to Stella’s when she was a little girl and had run over wearing her mama’s cerise beret to entertain her crippled aunt. Stella brought her little friend Nancy with the big blue eyes and fringe eyelashes of a child movie star. “Let me be your nurse,” they’d both clamored, struggling over a glass of water and spilling most of it. What was it: that speech Stella always recited, so perfectly with such confidence, with such expression? Ladies and gentlemen, I stand before you to sit behind you, to tell you something I know nothing about. Admission is free; pay at the door; pull up a chair;and sit on the floor!
Help! Pratt saw Son, bleeding, sitting on the floor, his body gushing from machine-gun fire in a hundred places. But now she was awake. And World War II had been over for years. Son was safe hidden somewhere. Maybe at Helicon. Maybe Chris slipped him food in the woods. Pratt hoped Krit wouldn’t ever turn the colored folks out from the house. Admission is free, pay at the door. Stella said the words as though they meant something.
People all said Stella would probably be the first woman president of the United States. Someday everybody would forget the war. Pratt imagined the child president—I stand before you to sit behind you—who would grant her beloved Son a full pardon for desertion.
AND STELLA? HER DREAM was of a white rose, lying centered on a piece of graph paper, where blue coordinates crossed. The pure white flower represented God. Careful of thorns, she picked up the rose, unreal flower, with a hand you could see through, like clear plastic. Very lightly, she tapped her crotch with the white rose. Suddenly, in Stella’s dream, a white dog, Pal, vomited a vile green substance. A bullet was fired along the trajectory of a hyperbola: it traveled past the slender tree trunks in the woods out through all space and time. Then it curved—because space, like a boomerang, is curved—and began rapidly to return.
IN CAT CARTWRIGHT’S DREAMS, every night, not just this night when she got her first job but day after day, week after week, year after year, she was running, gloriously running till morning came. Over a field, she ran this June night, 1964, in Alabama, holding the hand of her beloved brother, Don, who was going to marry her dear friend Stella.