Paradise, Page 5

  Mavis looked around the kitchen that seemed to her as large as her junior high school cafeteria and that also had swinging wooden doors. She imagined rooms full of rooms beyond those doors.

  “You all ain’t scared out here by yourselves? Don’t seem like there’s nothing for miles outside.”

  Connie laughed. “Scary things not always outside. Most scary things is inside.” She turned from the stove with a bowl and placed it before Mavis, who looked in despair at the steaming potatoes, over which a pat of butter melted. The Early Times drunk turned her hunger into nausea but she said thank you and accepted the fork in Connie’s hand. Anyway, the smell of the coffee was promising.

  Connie sat down next to her. “Maybe I go with you,” she said.

  Mavis looked up. It was the first time she saw the woman’s face without the sunglasses. Quickly she looked back at the food and poked the fork into the bowl.

  “What you say me and you go to California?”

  Mavis felt, but could not face, the woman’s smile. Had she washed her hands before warming up the potatoes? Her smell was walnuts, not pecans. “What about your job here?” Mavis forced herself to taste a tiny bit of potato. Salty.

  “It’s by the sea, California?”

  “Yeah. Right on the coast.”

  “Be nice to see water again.” Connie kept her eyes on Mavis’ face. “Wave after wave after wave. Big water. Blue, blue, blue, yes?”

  “That’s what they say. Sunny California. Beaches, oranges…”

  “Maybe too sunny for me.” Connie got up abruptly and went to the stove.

  “Can’t be sunnier than here.” The butter, salt and pepper mashed into the potatoes wasn’t all that bad. Mavis was eating rapidly. “Go for miles and don’t see a speck of shade.”

  “True,” said Connie. She placed two cups of coffee and a pot of honey on the table. “Too much sunshine in the world. Vex me. Can’t take it no more.”

  A breeze swept through the kitchen door, displacing the food smell with a sweeter one. Mavis had thought she would gulp the coffee when it arrived, but the satisfaction of the hot, salty potatoes made her patient. Following Connie’s example she spooned honey into her cup, stirring slowly.

  “Did you think up anything about how I can get me some gasoline?”

  “Wait awhile. Today maybe, tomorrow maybe. People be out to buy.”

  “Buy? Buy what?”

  “Garden things. Things I cook up. Things they don’t want to grow themselves.”

  “And one of them can take me to get some gas?”

  “Sure.”

  “Suppose nobody comes?”

  “Always come. Somebody always come. Every day. This morning already I sold forty-eight ears of corn and a whole pound of peppers.” She patted her apron pocket.

  Blowing gently into her cup, Mavis went to the kitchen door and looked out. When she first arrived she was so happy to find someone at home she had not looked closely at the garden. Now, behind the red chair, she saw flowers mixed in with or parallel to rows of vegetables. In some places staked plants grew in a circle, not a line, in high mounds of soil. Chickens clucked out of sight. A part of the garden she originally thought gone to weed became, on closer inspection, a patch of melons. An empire of corn beyond.

  “You didn’t do all that by yourself, did you?” Mavis gestured toward the garden.

  “Except the corn,” said Connie.

  “Wow.”

  Connie put the breakfast bowl in the sink. “You want to clean yourself up?”

  The rooms full of rooms Mavis imagined to be lying through the swinging doors had kept her from asking to go to a bathroom. Here in the kitchen she felt safe; the thought of leaving it disturbed her. “I’ll wait to see who comes by. Then I’ll try to get myself together. I know I look a sight.” She smiled, hoping the refusal did not signal her apprehension.

  “Suit yourself,” said Connie and, sunglasses in place, patted Mavis’ shoulder as she stepped into her splayed shoes and on out to the yard.

  Left alone Mavis expected the big kitchen to lose its comfort. It didn’t. In fact she had an outer-rim sensation that the kitchen was crowded with children—laughing? singing?—two of whom were Merle and Pearl. Squeezing her eyes shut to dissipate the impression only strengthened it. When she opened her eyes, Connie was there, dragging a thirty-two-quart basket over the floor.

  “Come on,” she said. “Make yourself useful.”

  Mavis frowned at the pecans and shook her head at the nutcrackers, picks and bowls Connie was assembling. “No,” she said. “Think of something else I can do to help. Shelling that stuff would make me crazy.”

  “No it wouldn’t. Try it.”

  “Uh uh. Not me.” Mavis watched as she organized the tools. “Shouldn’t you put some newspaper down? Be easier to clean up.”

  “No newspapers in this house. No radio either. Any news we get have to be from somebody telling it face-to-face.”

  “Just as well,” Mavis said. “All the news these days is bad as can be. Can’t do nothing about it anyway.”

  “You give in too quick. Look at your nails. Strong, curved like a bird’s—perfect pecan hands. Fingernails like that take the meat out whole every time. Beautiful hands, yet you say you can’t. Make you crazy. Make me crazy to see good nails go to waste.”

  Later, watching her suddenly beautiful hands moving at the task, Mavis was reminded of her sixth-grade teacher opening a book: lifting the corner of the binding, stroking the edge to touch the bookmark, caressing the page, letting the tips of her fingers trail down the lines of print. The melty-thigh feeling she got watching her. Now, working pecans, she tried to economize her gestures without sacrificing their grace. Connie, having launched her into the chore, was gone, saying she had to “see about Mother.” Sitting at the table, smelling the pleasure the wind brought through the door, Mavis wondered how old Connie’s mother was. Judging by the age of her daughter, she would have to be in her nineties. Also, how long before a customer would come? Had anybody bothered the Cadillac yet? At whatever gas station she got to, would there be a map showing the way back to sweet 70, or even 287? She would go north then, to Denver, then scoot west. With luck she’d be on her way by suppertime. With no luck, she’d be ready to leave in the morning. She would be back on concrete, listening to the car radio that had got her through the silence Bennie left, hours of nonstop driving—two fingers impatiently twirling for the better song, the nicer voice. Now the radio was across a field, down one road, then another. Off. In the space where its sound ought to be was…nothing. Just an absence, which she did not think she could occupy properly without the framing bliss of the radio. From the table where she sat admiring her busy hands, the radio absence spread out. A quiet, secret fire breathing itself and exhaling the sounds of its increase: the crack of shells, the tick of nut meat tossed in the bowl, cooking utensils in eternal adjustment, insect whisper, the argue of long grass, the faraway cough of cornstalks.

  It was peaceful, but she wished Connie would return lest she start up again—imagining babies singing. Just as the length of the woman’s absence seemed much too long, Mavis heard a car crunching gravel. Then braking. A door slap.

  “Hey, old lady.” A woman’s voice, light, loose.

  Mavis turned and saw a dark-skinned woman, limber and moving quickly, mount the steps and halt when she didn’t see what she expected.

  “Oh, excuse me.”

  “That’s okay,” said Mavis. “She’s upstairs. Connie.”

  “I see.”

  Mavis thought the woman was looking very carefully at her clothes.

  “Oh, lovely,” she said, coming to the table. “Just lovely.” She stuck her fingers into the bowl of pecans and gathered a few. Mavis expected her to eat some, but she let them fall back to the heap. “What’s Thanksgiving without pecan pie? Not a thing.”

  Neither one of them heard the bare feet plopping, and since the swinging doors had no sound, Connie’s entrance was like an appariti
on.

  “There you are!” The black woman opened her arms. Connie entered them for a long swaying hug. “I scared this girl to death. Never saw a stranger inside here before.”

  “Our first,” said Connie. “Mavis Albright, this is Soane Morgan.”

  “Hi, hon.”

  “Morgan. Mrs. Morgan.”

  Mavis’ face warmed, but she smiled anyway and said, “Sorry. Mrs. Morgan,” while taking note of the woman’s expensive oxford shoes, sheer stockings, wool cardigan and the cut of her dress: summer-weight crepe, pale blue with a white collar.

  Soane opened a crocheted purse. “I brought some more,” she said, and held up a pair of aviator-style sunglasses.

  “Good. I got one pair left.”

  Soane glanced at Mavis. “She eats sunglasses.”

  “Not me. This house eats them.” Fitting the stems behind her ears, Connie tested the dark lenses at the doorway. She turned her face directly to the sun and the “Hah!” she shouted was full of defiance.

  “Somebody order shelled pecans, or is this your idea?”

  “My idea.”

  “Make a lot of pies.”

  “Make more than pie.” Connie rinsed the sunglasses under the sink tap and peeled away the sticker.

  “I don’t want to hear, so don’t tell me. I came for the you-know-what.”

  Connie nodded. “Can you get this girl some gasoline for her automobile? Take her and bring her back?” She was drying and polishing the new glasses, checking for spots and lint from the towel.

  “Where is your car?” asked Soane. There was wonder in her voice, as though she doubted anyone in thongs, wrinkled slacks and a child’s dirty sweatshirt could have a car.

  “Route eighteen,” Mavis told her. “Took me hours to walk here, but in a car…”

  Soane nodded. “Happy to. But I’ll have to get somebody else to drive you back. I would, but I’ve got too much to do. Both my boys due on furlough.” Proudly, she looked at Connie. “House’ll be full before I know it.” Then, “How’s Mother?”

  “Can’t last.”

  “You sure Demby or Middleton’s not a better idea?”

  Connie slipped the aviator glasses into her apron pocket and headed for the pantry. “She wouldn’t draw but one breath in a hospital. The second one would be her last.”

  The small pouch Connie placed on top of a basket of pecans could have been a grenade. Positioned on the seat of the Oldsmobile between Mavis and Soane Morgan, the cloth packet emanated tension. Soane kept touching it as though to remind herself that it was there. The easy talk in the kitchen had disappeared. Suddenly formal, Soane said very little, answered Mavis’ questions with the least information and asked none of her own.

  “Connie’s nice, isn’t she?”

  Soane looked at her. “Yes. She is.”

  For twenty minutes they traveled, Soane cautious at every rise or turn of the road, however slight. She seemed to be on the lookout for something. They stopped at a one-pump gas station in the middle of nowhere and asked the man who limped to the window for five gallons to carry. There was an argument, peppered with long silences, about the five-gallon can. He wanted Mavis to pay for it; she said she would return it when she came back to fill her tank. He doubted it. Finally they settled for a two-dollar deposit. Soane and Mavis drove away, turned into another road, heading east for what seemed like an hour. Pointing toward a fancy wooden sign, Soane said, “Here we are.” The sign read RUBY POP. 360 on top and LODGE 16 at the bottom.

  Mavis’ immediate impression of the little town was how still it was, as though no one lived there. Except for a feed store and a savings and loan bank, it had no recognizable business district. They drove down a wide street, past enormous lawns cut to dazzle in front of churches and pastel-colored houses. The air was scented. The trees young. Soane turned into a side street of flower gardens wider than the houses and snowed with butterflies.

  The odor of the five-gallon can had been fierce in Soane’s car. But in the boy’s truck, propped between Mavis’ feet, it was indistinguishable from the others. The gluey, oily, metally combination might have made her retch if he had not done voluntarily what Mavis had been unable to ask of Soane Morgan: turn on the radio. The disc jockey announced the tunes as though they were made by his family or best friends: King Solomon, Brother Otis, Dinah baby, Ike and Tina girl, Sister Dakota, the Temps.

  As they bounced along, Mavis, cheerful now, enjoyed the music and the shaved part in the boy’s hair. Although he was pleasanter than Soane, he didn’t have much more to say. They were several miles away from Ruby pop. 360 and listening to the seventh of Jet magazine’s top twenty when Mavis realized that, other than the gas station guy, she had not seen a single white.

  “Any white people in your town?”

  “Not to live, they ain’t. Come on business sometime.”

  When they glimpsed the mansion in the distance on the way to the Cadillac, he asked, “What’s it like in there?”

  “I only been in the kitchen,” Mavis answered.

  “Two old women in that big of a place. Don’t seem right.”

  The Cadillac was unmolested but so hot the boy licked his fingers before and after he unscrewed the gas cap. And he was nice enough to start the engine for her and tell her to leave the doors open for a while before she got in. Mavis did not have to struggle to get him to accept money—Soane had been horrified—and he drove off accompanying “Hey Jude” on his radio.

  Behind the wheel, cooling in the air-conditioned air, Mavis regretted not having noticed the radio station’s number on the dashboard of the boy’s truck. She fiddled the dial uselessly as she drove the Cadillac back to Connie’s house. She parked, and the Cadillac, dark as bruised blood, stayed there for two years.

  It was already sunset when the boy started the engine. Also she had forgotten to ask him for directions. Also she couldn’t remember where the gas station with her two-dollar deposit was and didn’t want to search for it in the dark. Also Connie had stuffed and roasted a chicken. But her decision to spend the night was mostly because of Mother.

  The whiteness at the center was blinding. It took a moment for Mavis to see the shape articulated among the pillows and the bone-white sheets, and she might have remained sightless longer had not an authoritative voice said, “Don’t stare, child.”

  Connie bent over the foot of the bed and reached under the sheet. With her right hand she raised Mother’s heels and with her left fluffed the pillows underneath them. Muttering “Toenails like razors,” she resettled the feet gently.

  When her eyes grew accustomed to dark and light, Mavis saw a bed shape far too small for a sick woman—almost a child’s bed—and a variety of tables and chairs in the rim of black that surrounded it. Connie selected something from one of the tables and leaned into the light that ringed the patient. Mavis, following her movements, watched her apply Vaseline to lips in a face paler than the white cloth wrapped around the sick woman’s head.

  “There must be something that tastes better than this,” said Mother, trailing the tip of her tongue over her oiled lips.

  “Food,” said Connie. “How about some of that?”

  “No.”

  “Bit of chicken?”

  “No. Who is this you brought in here? Why did you bring somebody in here?”

  “I told you. Woman with a car need help.”

  “That was yesterday.”

  “No it wasn’t. This morning I told you.”

  “Well, hours ago, then, but who invited her into my privacy? Who did that?”

  “Guess. You, that’s who. Want your scalp massaged?”

  “Not now. What is your name, child?”

  Mavis whispered it from the dark she stood in.

  “Step closer. I can’t see anything unless it’s right up on me. Like living in an eggshell.”

  “Disregard her,” Connie told Mavis. “She sees everything in the universe.” Drawing a chair bedside, she sat down, took the woman’s hand and one
by one stroked back the cuticles on each crooked finger.

  Mavis moved closer, into the circle of light, resting her hand on the metal foot of the bed.

  “Are you all right now? Is your automobile working?”

  “Yes, m’am. It’s fine. Thank you.”

  “Where are your children?”

  Mavis could not speak.

  “There used to be a lot of children here. This was a school once. A beautiful school. For girls. Indian girls.”

  Mavis looked at Connie, but when she returned her glance, Mavis quickly lowered her eyes.

  The woman in the bed laughed lightly. “It’s hard, isn’t it,” she said, “looking in those eyes. When I brought her here they were green as grass.”

  “And yours was blue,” said Connie.

  “Still are.”

  “So you say.”

  “What color, then?”

  “Same as me—old-lady wash-out color.”

  “Hand me a mirror, child.”

  “Give her nothing.”

  “I’m still in charge here.”

  “Sure. Sure.”

  All three watched the brown fingers gentling the white ones. The woman in the bed sighed. “Look at me. Can’t sit up by myself and arrogant to the end. God must be laughing His head off.”

  “God don’t laugh and He don’t play.”

  “Yes, well, you know all about Him, I’m sure. Next time you see Him, tell Him to let the girls in. They bunch around the door, but they don’t come in. I don’t mind in the daytime, but they worry my sleep at night. You’re feeding them properly? They’re always so hungry. There’s plenty, isn’t there? Not those frycake things they like but good hot food the winters are so bad we need coal a sin to burn trees on the prairie yesterday the snow sifted in under the door quaesumus, da propitius pacem in diebus nostris Sister Roberta is peeling the onions et a peccato simus semper liberi can’t you ab omni perturbatione securi…”

  Connie folded Mother’s hands on the sheet and stood, signaling Mavis to follow her. She closed the door and they stepped into the hall.

  “I thought she was your mother. I mean the way you talked, I thought she was your own mother.” They were descending the wide central stairs.