A Mirror and Some Songs
Late afternoons, I drove the streets, circled blocks, memorized the short cuts to grocery stores and clubs until the town made sense. Nights, I drove 640 around Knoxville, took exits I’d never heard of and let myself get lost just for the hell of it. Most times, I ended up at Willy’s like it was some homing ground I couldn’t forget. I was sitting there now in the empty parking lot, sipping cold coffee and ready to head on back to the Red Sari, when Cody Black’s car pulled in too. Music was jacked up, some song I didn’t know. Love had wings that spread across the sky at night. A woman sang and bass guitar sounds spilled across the parking lot as I got out of my car and went on over.
A cigarette with a hand attached to it hung out his open window. I said hello, but there was no hearing anything above the song. Love had wings and teeth to hold on fast. He tapped his hand against the side of the car, then seemed to think better of it, and turned the music down a tad. He shut off the engine, just as the song was starting to crescendo and I’d tuned in to the lyrics a little more. Wings and teeth and love that stings no matter how hard you try. What kind of love song was that for 8:30 of a Sunday morning?
“You here on a day off too?” I leaned against his car.
“Catching up on a few things while it’s quiet.” He tapped his cigarette against the rolled-down window and I moved back.
“Had breakfast?”
“Not yet.” He forced his glove compartment shut against a wad of papers and a big plastic cup.
“Found some good biscuits and gravy at that place across the street.”
“I’ve got coffee and peanut butter crackers.” The car door screeched as he pushed it open. “I’ll share.”
A ceiling-to-floor tank was on one side of the hall, sharks swimming there. They were big, burly-looking things, one of them missing an eye, the other an albino, both of them a long way from an ocean. The sharks had survived every fire and destruction Willy’s had known, Cody told me as we watched them swish by.
He sat cross-legged on the ratty carpet. Light settled around him, and it could have been like hallucinogenic tracers, but Cody Black was finer than that, I’d come to believe. “Thinks he’s smarter than the rest of us,” one of the cubicle ladies said when I first asked around after Cody Black. “Him?” Marvis Temple said. Tattoos and music loud enough it’d break your eardrums. From East Tennessee, somebody else said. In New York City for a couple years, then right back home again, his body covered in tattoos. “Thinks he’s after God or truth or whatever.” A turn or two in Peru or Venezuela and enough vision medicine to remind himself he was lost and belonged where he started from in the first place. Light, though there was none in this dank hallway, settled somewhere behind his left shoulder, drifted down and touched his face, lingered in his eyes. A week back, I’d asked him for supper at the diner beside the motel, but he’d turned me down. I was nervous, so I fished around in my pocketbook for my poker deck and shuffled, laid down three cards. “Let me tell your future.”
“You believe in fortunes?” Cody asked.
I turned over the ace of hearts, which seemed like a fine card for anyone’s past.
“Depends on what you mean by believe.”
His next card was the two of diamonds.
“I’m giving you three cards only. Past. Present. Future.”
“How long you been reading cards, Miracelle?”
“About as long as those sharks look like they been in that tank.” The sharks trailed each other like they were pacing a floor.
I turned over the third card. The queen of diamonds.
“These three cards together.” I paused, thinking about possibilities. “They’re about new beginnings.” I wasn’t really sure about that, of course, but it was as good a riff as any, especially on a poker deck.
“What beginnings brought you to Knoxville, Miracelle?”
“You know the score on that one, Cody. Told you about it that first night we met.”
He shrugged. “I don’t know two red cents about you, as a matter of fact.”
I shuffled the cards again, thinking one more card couldn’t hurt. I drew out the ace of spades. That ace couldn’t equal anything to do with hearts, so I slipped it back in the deck. “What do you want to know?”
“Where are you from?”
“Lived in Maine one winter, and the cold about did me in. I’m a creature of sun and sand.”
“Not much of that in East Tennessee.” He smiled. “Do you have a home base?”
“You saw my car. Dodge Dart. Slant-six engine.”
He lay back on the carpeted floor, arms beneath his head, and stared at the sharks. “What’s a woman with a name like Miracelle Loving doing here, now?”
“Let’s talk about your future, not mine,” I said as the sharks dove, nosed their glass.
“I told you that first night I’m not convinced where fortune-telling is concerned.”
“Fortunes are a million years old, I’ll have you know.”
“What I know about my future I don’t need cards for,” he said. “I figure I’ll work here till I’ve saved up enough.”
“For what?”
“My own business.”
“Doing?”
“Doing what I love.” I could see the underside of his one arm and words tattooed there. They looked red and tender on their edges, like they’d just been drawn there. We must believe. “I’ll call it Visionary Tattoos. Something like that.”
“Knoxville doesn’t lack on the tattoo places.” I laughed. “But I reckon there’s money to be made in faith?”
We were quiet for a little.
“Don’t you ever just want,” he said then, “I don’t know, just to stay put?”
“Staying put sounds too much like a stuck door to me,” I said.
He sighed. “What about love and somebody knowing you inside and out?”
“Love?” I shook my head. “Been there and back.”
“Miracelle.” He got up, shoved his hand in his pockets. “I guess you’ll tell me about yourself when you’re ready.”
Days off from Willy’s I hand-washed my underwear in the motel sink. Ordered pizza for breakfast. No matter what I did, I was antsy. What would being happy look like? Ruby asked me some long nights. If I was honest about it and looked myself straight on, I really had no idea. I got two cents’ worth of happy out of brushing my hair, my teeth, and rolling lint from my clothes. On my days off, I cranked the motel windows open and lay there until nigh on eleven o’clock. I paced my room, paced downstairs to the lobby, paced to my car and back. Hell, I was pacing in my dreams. Dreams were the house of the soul, those self-help books said, but helping myself sounded like a family dinner and I’d never had many of those. Happiness? Just look, Ruby’s voice said to me again and again. I’d tried looking, plenty.
Once I’d rented a slate-shingled shack out in the woods and stayed put until spring. Another time I cuddled beside the ocean and a woman with wild red hair whose bitten fingers were rough as she touched me and told me that this, more than anything I’d known, was what love felt like. Staying put, Cody Black had said. I’d tried that one north and south, east and west, and here I was trying it all over again.
I covered the beat-up motel dresser with a violet headscarf and set my decks of cards on a saucer. I bought plastic hangers and hung up all my shirts and dresses and tacked up a net shoe bag on the back of the closet door. I had two or three diner cups I’d snuck out of the place across from Willy’s, packs of ramen noodles, and a plug-in kettle to boil them in. I even bought a tube of lipstick and dyed my hair, a new color they called Moonlight that came out a chalky-looking black. I lay awake at three in the morning and looked at the ceiling, listening to time pass on a windup clock from the dollar store. Got a love spell for me now? I whispered to Ruby in motel room dark, but by then she’d been quiet for days.
Cody began to wait for me at the end of work at Willy’s and we went to this diner or that one for supper. After, we haunted downtown Knoxville, walked along the river and the shops that sold things neither of us could much afford. We parked across the street from the fancy-schmantzy apartment building that used to be an ordinary old bank. We parked ourselves at dives with walls painted like the sea, listened to poets with lip piercings. I trailed my fingers through the wet rings glasses left and told myself a fortune lay there inside the circles. Taste the fire of now, they sang. Taste the fire of nothing at all. We sat in a parking lot for two hours one night as a steady, soft rain fell and we listened to the local radio station play Kurt Cobain.
Cody asked me about myself again and again. About the jobs I’d had, the rooms I’d rented, the family that raised me. I told him about Ruby Loving, dispenser of love potions, teller of fortunes. I told him about the jobs I’d had and a lover or two. I told him next to nothing about my life, and nothing at all about the night Ruby died.
“And what about the rest of you, Miracelle?”
“What rest?” I punched him on the shoulder, pushed open the car door. “Take me dancing, Cody Black!”
We ran, our shirts soaked as rain set in. The Knoxville air felt almost like fall. By autumn, I could be standing in a doorway at night watching lightning bugs with a person I had yet to meet asking me to dance to music on a radio in the next new room I’d rent. I didn’t want to think about that. Not yet.
Ruby and I danced plenty when I was a kid. She’d braid my wet hair to make me hippy curls and she wore her red lipstick while we danced to the radio. We played “Ramblin’ Man” and danced slow. We turned up the Rolling Stones and danced until our T-shirts stuck to our backs. Love was in every song she liked most on the radio as we drove through one more town and stopped at another place where we’d set up shop. She made sure there was a new bulb in the lamp at the window and I tacked up the sign one more time. Ruby Loving, Card Readings. Ten Dollars. Your Future Guaranteed. She put up crystals in the windows and the bleached-out bones of birds on the sill, and word got around plenty. Cars passed by late at night, windows rolled down and bottles flying out, breaking on the road. My mother, a cross between a prophetess and a red-light wonder. “That Ruby Loving,” they said behind my back in the halls at whatever school it was, that time. “Ruby Loving, ten bucks a fortune, a trip around the world.” Their words buzzed in my head, both wrong and right. Her love charms followed us, town to town.
Many the night I sat with her, her in a blue satin thrift store bathrobe. We shared plates of leftover chicken and bread slices dipped in gravy and I shuffled her cards for her, an open bottle of red wine between us like we were friends, me the one who knew the end game was always the same.
“Pick a card for me,” she’d say, her eyes all bright. “Just one.”
If I drew something she wanted—the Lovers or the Magician—she’d say a rhyme in my ear to make me laugh. Three silver spoons of brandy wine and you shall be mine, you shall be mine. If I drew the Tower or the Crone, my mother was just what she was. Her hands wrapped themselves around her wine glass tight enough to break it, and conjured Tom or Fred or Rick. All of them who’d loved on her and none them loving enough, all the names filling up the room so fast it was a wonder I could breathe.
“Tell me, Miracelle,” she said. “Tell me why he doesn’t love me.”
I’d dip polish out of the bottle, her fingers spread across the kitchen table so I could paint them and tell her all I knew, one more time. How pretty she was, beautiful as the blue glass bottles in our windows, the cobalt shadows dark made. Her hands and the fortunes she told, why, they were wise as wise could get. It was them who were the fools where love was concerned, not her.
One time it was a preacher. He wanted his fortune told as long as no one saw him there to ask. He’d put his soft palm against my forehead every time he stopped by to see Ruby. “God loves you, you know,” he’d say, and I’d nod my head like I agreed.
Another place we lived was so cold we left the oven door open to keep the heat. A carpenter came to fix the window frames in that place. “Take me dancing,” she said, and he sat with me while she went to do herself up, his rough fingers snagging in my hair.
Some nights Ruby was gone so long I’d give her up until there she’d be, bringing me a tiny present, a dime store surprise. A little box of Jean Naté cologne to rub on my wrists. A bright blue band that held my hair back so tight it hurt. In somebody’s book, these were the things good mothers did. I know she believed that, but there were whole days lost. Her staring off down the street like she was waiting for a car to come that hadn’t yet. I got her to tell me stories, those times. Stories and memories of a past I wasn’t in to get us through the night.
“When I was little,” she’d say, “they’d braid my hair and rub my cheeks with mullein.”
And she’d tell about what they called Quaker rouge to make your cheeks blush. Or cucumber slices to bleach a face. Barley water for wrinkles. How to hold your lips when you smiled, how to lean in just enough when you read a fortune in the iris of an eye.
“I still want a wedding like they used to have.”
“Like what?”
“A wedding and a shivaree,” she said.
She poured me a little more wine in a metal cup and shuffled her cards while she told about it. A yard full of music and a bower made of petals. Fiddles tuned and liquor passed one to the next after the vows were said. Some of them would throw pebbles at the window glass, keep it up until a light came on and the man who’d wed was at the window, leaning out. Come down, they shouted, come down, and before you knew it, he did. And the dancing went on and they passed the jar again and the cars started up. You could just imagine it, her alone in the bed, waiting for him to hold her again.
But why, I asked later as Ruby turned back the sheets for the bed we shared most nights. It’s what folks did, I reckon, she said. Her body was cool and damp from the bath she’d had. “Love,” she said as I snuggled beside her. “Why, it’s enough to make anyone shiver, on and on.”
Her one hand lay across my chest and I held it.
“Tell me more about love,” I’d ask.
She’d tell me, like she always did, about the highways I’d see, the lovers I’d know, the lands and foreign places I’d leave behind.
“But how come,” I asked.
“Which how is that?”
“How come we’re alone?” I had questions and questions she never answered about who my father was, where my people were, who made us, me and her both.
“They always say love is patient.”
“Is it?” I asked.
Her lips were soft and bruised looking in the low light from the lamp still on in the kitchen.
When I looked at Cody Black as we sipped whiskey in a dive bar or stepped into the doorway of a diner for breakfast at the break of dawn, I saw in his face a kind of map of places I’d never seen yet, and I felt my chest tighten. Love. The world was full of it. A window display in Old Town Knoxville, where I walked late at night when I couldn’t sleep. The window was hung with netting threaded with red heart sequins, and bald-headed mannequins wrapped their slick mannequin arms around one another. Love was in the air, a sign promised. Love. The word made me feel such sadness I had to shake it off me like rain.
Falling in love. Falling was the world from a height so great no one had ever seen the like. Falling was a place from which any of us might never make our way back. Falling was the memory of my mother’s breathing, how it sounded almost like my own as I lay awake at the Red Sari those nights. Love was moonlight pouring into one more room. How I laid my head against my mother’s shoulder and said, Ruby. Tell me who we are.