Extremely Alert

[Feel free to print the Google document instead of reading the story as a blog post. Photo below: TOMBOLO! by Pat.]


The groom’s mother, shimmering blue watersilk with shoes dyed to match, dabs perfume behind her ears, saving a drop for the lacy handkerchief she slips in her purse, the very same handkerchief she carried when she and John said their vows. “Oh beautiful dress,” she sings, twisting to get a view of herself in the bathroom mirror. “You were there on that rack when I needed you most.” She believes steadfastly in omens of good fortune and looks for them everywhere. “Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.”

She is the something old, the bride is the something new, her dress is the something blue; and if only the bride will ask, her handkerchief will be the something borrowed.

Randy, elder brother and best man, fully and impeccably dressed, stands and folds a tiny square of flannel. The mother fidgets as he tucks the flannel carefully into his shoe kit, recognizing the pattern as belonging to his once-favorite pajamas. That would also be something old, but the best man does not traditionally have superstitions. Perhaps Clifford, the groom, will wear a penny in his shoe for good luck, or should she be the one to wear a penny in her shoe, her luck having deserted her so long ago when the boys were mere babies and she lost their father. Will today be one of her heightened awareness days, she wonders and pours the second cup of coffee that she almost drank down the lavatory drain. Even so, she is likely to remember too much, to see and hear too clearly.

“Extremely alert,” Randy says, “You look extremely alert, Mother dear,” and she asks if he means to bless or curse her.

Clifford, half dressed, opens the hall closet and pokes at a set of golf clubs. “Can’t find my black shoes.”

“You’ve never put shoes in there,” the mother says. She hears a tinge of hysteria in his voice.

“I’m looking for the flashlight; where is it?” Clifford straightens. “The blooming light’s out in my closet.”

“Flashlight?” the mother says, remembering the flashlight dead and leaking a month ago and writing it down on her grocery list but not remembering to buy one. No point now in making a full confession… Full confessions never make anybody feel better.

Clifford grins, “I had my teeth cleaned. Nobody can say I didn’t have my sweet little old teeth cleaned.”

Randy shakes his head. “The poor bride. Poor, poor Nancy.”

“Don’t say that.” The mother sighs and puts her arm around Randy’s waist. Be quiet, tongue. She cannot stop this banter between brothers. Their father should be here to deal with them man to man. It isn’t fair that widows should be left with everything to do. She hums the wedding march.

“Do shut up,” they say like twins.

“I still think we should have a limo.” Randy holds up his new wallet, a gift from the groom. “I can afford it.”

“I know you can, dear, but I couldn’t. Conspicuous consumption makes me feel ridiculous.”

“Obviously.” Randy looks pointedly at the sofa bed he has slept the night on and at the coffee table pathetically in need of refinishing. He has offered to replace both pieces and been shushed.

She thinks this very minute, when they have not even left for the church he is picturing her returning to this wreck alone—their home sweet home. No apologies. Too late for being in the kitchen baking cookies. Too late for making the children’s beds.

Randy picks up a purplish ashtray and empties it in the fireplace. “I might have been an artist—professionally, I mean. This work shows real promise.”

She watches him handling the precious objects from her desk—his perfect hand in plaster from the Mother’s Day he was five, Clifford’s balsa-wood hotrod painted fluorescent pink. She silently screams, “My collection—don’t touch.”

“Look at that glaze.” He holds the ashtray under the lamp. “The purple blob. Outstanding.”

She remembers the expression of pride on his first-grade face. “You took it out of your bag so calmly and handed it to me as if you made ashtrays every day of the week.”

“The teacher kept saying, are you making that for your father and I didn’t want to admit that my father was dead or that my mother smoked so I said it was for myself.”

He smiles as if the faraway boy didn’t really need the father he was once embarrassed not to have.

The mother frowns and tries to remember how she felt when she was not yet a widow. “I thought you were happy in school. Naïve of me.”

“Not at all. Looking back—as a man of experience… First grade teachers are viewed somewhat uncritically.” He touches her shoulder “… while Mothers are always Mothers.”

“Of course, what else could we be?” She thinks, now it is open to question with surrogate mothers all over the place but for me it was an absolute state. She wants to say, “And you might have had (almost did have) a different mother.”

She checks again to be sure the lacy handkerchief is in her purse, the handkerchief John’s mother gave her for “something borrowed”—still beautifully white and perfectly ironed in case Nancy should turn and ask if she has “something old.”

“Perhaps I do,” she would say and offer the handkerchief. No reason really she should expect Nancy to ask. Weddings were fantasy enough without adding her own, but she would have it if Nancy should want it, though probably brides didn’t have those little superstitions anymore. Nor grooms.

Clifford all dressed now except for shoes, comes into the living room, twirling about in his stocking feet, coattails flying straight out like a turkey cock’s feathers.

“Not in your closet?” the Mother says.

“Did you send them out to be polished? That might be it.”

Randy, as always, thinks of the one logical course of action the bridegroom might have taken and a conversation from weeks ago about dress suits and black patent shoes comes back to her, some vague admonition she gave to have his shoes smartened up and marking that off her mental list of things to mention. He is a grown man, after all, about to become “head of household” or is there any such thing anymore?

“What am I going to do?” Clifford for the first time looks stricken. “I thought I was all set. I did every stupid thing on Nancy’s list.”

The Mother starts. Nancy’s stupid list? Does the bride make a list for the groom? She doesn’t remember making a list. She pats her tiny hat into place and stands back from the hall mirror to check her slip. Hang in there underwear. Don’t give up the ship garter belt. Don’t have a sneezing fit nose.

“I can’t believe you expected me to provide you with a pair of black shoes,” Randy says. “Nancy didn’t give me a list and mine won’t fit you.”

“No, I’m sure I didn’t expect you to provide shoes. I bought the ring.”

She looks at Randy’s watch and remembers John slipping her ring on and how totally married she felt from that moment on.

“What am I going to do? Go barefoot?”

She wonders if Nancy has ever heard that in his voice, a kind of hysterical silliness. John couldn’t stand silliness.

“I know my feet are bigger than yours.” Clifford glares at Randy as if he meant to punch him, but instead brings out from behind his back a pair of black basketball shoes covered with dust.

“Don’t breathe, Mother.”

“Clifford, look at your knees.”

Randy opens his suitcase and offers his clothes brush.

She holds out her hand. “I’ll do it.” Adrenaline sweeps through her body. She orders Randy, “You get the taxi.”

Clifford stands stiffly for her to brush his suit.

She tries to remember what their father wore on their marriage day and can only remember his sweet smile, his sweet arms around her.

“Are you sure you didn’t take your shoes to the shop? Look in your wallet and see if you have a ticker.”

Clifford turns his wallet out onto the table: credit cards, driver’s license, and small crushed ticket saying Shoe Renew.

They look at one another and smile. If nothing else the shoes exist, did not jump unwittingly into the Goodwill bag or self-immolate.

“Put on your loafers and we’ll swing by and get them.” Randy locks the door and pushes the elevator button.

“They say that stuff about selling things if you don’t pick them up, but they don’t really do it.”

“Right.”

How handsome he is hurrying down the street while Clifford stands serenely gazing at the stone steps across the street. What can he be thinking? She cannot believe that in forty minutes he will stand beside his bride and repeat the holy bonds of matrimony. Should she tell him about the birds and the bees?

“You look lovely, Mother-of-the-Groom,” Clifford says.

She squeezes his arm and thinks how easily she found her white gloves, how perfectly her shoes match her dress, how unlike herself she looks today.

“You’re absolutely psychic,” Clifford said every time she turned up a missing cufflink and she basked in it. Now she is suffering from her eternal mother’s pride. The Groom’s mother has so little to do, she might have remembered shoes. Too late, too late.

They climb into the taxi, mother in the middle, the place she claimed—keeping them apart because each always wanted a window. Now Clifford would have his own ally and she would keep still. No matter what happened she would not speak. They could have babies or not have babies; she would never speak. They could live in Timbuctoo if they wanted—but no, no, no.

Randy leans across her lap. “Do you remember where the shop is?”

Clifford glares back. “I walk by the place every day.”

“Don’t start that.” She puts a hand over each big fist. How small their father would have looked between them. They were huge horses beside him. They would think him too small, too delicate. But he would be with her, not them, and he would not be too small.

“Why didn’t you pick them up if you went by the shop every day?”

In that moment the mother knows that Randy will never marry, that his standards are too high, that he is not foolish and inconsiderate enough to marry, that he can settle for nothing less than perfection, and that she will never see his children.

“Driver, stop right here.” Clifford jumps out of the cab and points triumphantly to the window where finished shoes are lined in a row. He bangs on the door. “Anybody there?”

If this were a movie, she thinks, he would put his fist through and pluck out the shoes, without a scratch, while upstairs over the shop a couple would hear the commotion and frown down at the madman banging on the door and calmly close the shutters.

Randy gets out of the taxi and points to the CLOSED sign. “It won’t matter, Cliff. Nobody ever looks at the groom.”

Clifford lets Randy push him towards the taxi.

They settle on either side of her again, breathing heavily, saying nothing. Closing her eyes, she feels a memory break loose from where it has hovered all day waiting its chance to float free, a story John’s sister told her long after he died, how he courted a young woman for more than a year and planned to propose marriage, how the sister packed a picnic for him and he borrowed the family car to drive to a particularly romantic spot in the country to declare his intentions, and how just after they got started the car broke down totally. In his efforts to repair it, he covered his white linen suit with grease and dirt and was too embarrassed to propose. She looked away quickly from the laughing sister, feeling her heart pierced for poor John and the woman who might have been his bride.

She has never told the boys because she does not want them to think of their father as ridiculous and because they were never the right age to understand how nearly she had not been their mother. Now it comes rushing out, one word tumbling over the other as the taxi gets closer and closer to the church.

Randy pats her hand. “That was a bit of a close call, old dear.”

Clifford stares out the window as if he has not heard one word.

Perhaps she should not have told the story today, or ever. They could care less that they exist quite by chance.

The church looms in front of them, covering a city block with its sanctuary, inner courtyards, library, and fellowship hall. Randy leans over and hands the driver a bill. “Take us to the side entrance and then drive slowly around and leave our mother at the front steps.” He turns to her and whispers, “Our extremely alert mother.”

She watches them enter by the choir door, Randy with his arm around Clifford’s shoulder, showing him with the other hand that the ring is safe in his waistcoat pocket. They turn and throw her a kiss, as if it were a lark, some debutante party they are attending in search of a wife and might yet emerge from with unsettled feelings. She feels quite the wallflower in advance and longs for John to hold her, to give her his arm for the long walk down the aisle.

“Tears, get back where you belong.” She leans back hard against the seat, clutching her purse with an edge of old lace caught in the clasp.

[Undated short story by Virginia McKinnon Mann.]

The Silver Belt Buckle

[Feel free to print the Google document instead of reading the story as a blog post.]

I look in the mirror and smile as broadly as possible. I think that if teeth are all it takes, I will be quite successful. I part my hair in the middle and see that I look old-fashioned like Uncle Matthew. I pull it forward and smile rakishly; now I am my father all over.

The silver belt buckle I am wearing belonged to my grandfather, my mother’s father; and for many years my mother thought that it lay buried with my grandfather’s remains. She thought that Uncle Matthew, who lived with Grandfather and made all the funeral arrangements, had not wanted me to have the silver belt buckle, that he had been resentful that I, not he, shared these engraved initials. See how beautifully they are cut into the silver; a Mr. Farrier, a great friend of Grandfather, gave it to him. He was a jeweler and did the engraving himself. Grandfather, an open, warm-hearted person, had lots of friends but Mr. Farrier was his best friend. No one has ever understood why Uncle Matthew, his only song, could grow up to be solitary, never marry, and be interested only in rocks.

Nothing however has ever seemed strange about Uncle Matthew to me. I have always loved and admired him and I was watching when he walked up to the front of the church for his last look at Grandfather. I saw him reach inside the coffin and slip this buckle into his palm. I saw him execute that sleight of hand because I was seated to the side of the front pew, while my mother’s weeping face was turned into my father’s shoulder and his gaze was directed to the tip of his shoe.

When we visited on the anniversary of Grandfather’s death and drove out to the cemetery to lay flowers on his grave and on Grandmother’s grave next to him, she must have thought bitterly of the buckle deep in the ground. Yet she never asked Uncle Matthew or me if what she thought to be true was true; and while Uncle Matthew may have known what she was thinking (may indeed for all I know have rejoiced in her bitterness) I had not a glimmer. Some secrets are kept out of ignorance. That was why I never spoke of what I knew. The belt buckle would be mine when I had grown big enough to wear long pants and need a belt. I understood that condition just as I understood my mother’s fear that I would not grow up to be “normal”, that I would choose a strange profession such as geology, never marry, and give her no grandchildren. Yet her concern for my future life assured me that there would be a future life, that nothing could stop me from growing up. It was as if her thoughts of me as an adult, odd and reclusive as I possibly might be, staved off disease and pestilence, prevented the Angel of Death from discovering my whereabouts. I have always felt lucky. This buckle is lucky because it is a gift of love.

Before I was born, my parents had elected to live in San Francisco and even after I was born, they found that an apartment was quite large enough for their needs. It was because they could always drive down the Peninsula any weekend to visit Grandfather that they felt no need for a house and land. I was sent to visit every summer while they went to other large cities around the world for their vacations of more operas and museums and fine restaurants. They were relieved that because of these annual exposures I would grow up with a proper understanding of the natural world. Although they had chosen to be city dwellers, they said, it did not mean that they scorned the life Grandfather and Uncle Matthew led; but they regarded it as an existence more suitable for children than for adults such as themselves.

“They’ve sent you to rusticate,” Uncle Matthew always said when I arrived for one of my annual visits. “Let’s go out to see the sheep.”

We would lean on the fence and Uncle Matthew would give the sheep a report on the evening news, announce some earthquake in China or an eclipse of the moon we could expect to see next week if the clouds weren’t took thick. I knew that it was myself he was educating, but it was a good joke that the sheep had an interest in world events.

They were Blackface which Grandfather had bought from his friend Mr. Farrier and their startling black masks against the white fleece put me in mind of Halloween, false teeth, and the old saying about “wolves in sheep’s clothing.”

Yet like all sheep they lay low and spent their whole efforts cropping the meadow, their strong, occlusive teeth never still until every blade of grass was nipped clean to the ground.

“You can’t fool a Ewe,” Uncle Matthew told me. “You can’t make a Ewe take another Ewe’s lamb. If the mother dies, the lamb will die. It’s the damnest thing about sheep. You can’t teach them a thing.”

It was this passion for teaching me everything he knew that endeared Uncle Matthew to me, that the affection we shared for Grandfather.

“He’s been looking for you all day,” Uncle Matthew would say, having given my parents a chance to greet Grandfather privately and tell him anything they wished before I was brought back to the house. Or was it that Uncle Matthew loved me and my company so much that he wanted to be with me first. So glorious wooed—how could I have been happier.

Turning away from the pasture, we visited the chicken house to collect the warm eggs, both of us laughing at the squawking, offended chickens as they half-jumped, half-flew from their boxes. Better yet, I was allowed to place the thin glass eggs Uncle Matthew kept in the china closet into the nesting boxes. “Can the hens possibly believe those dead-white eggs are the results of their own efforts?” Grandfather asked me. “No,” he answered, “It is instinct that makes them start to set when the nest is full. They can’t think a single thing through,” he said sadly, as if he wished dumb animals had been dealt a better hand. But together we tricked the hens. [Note: the original version of this paragraph had Uncle Matthew saying that, not Grandfather.]

“It’s a blessing Mother can’t see how Matt’s let everything run down,” my mother always teases after one of our visits to Grandfather; and I thought she disliked Uncle Matthew because he did not take care of the house well enough, refusing to have a regular cleaning arrangement, letting spider webs accumulate in all the bedrooms, doing nothing at all with my grandmother’s rose garden. Did she wish that she could get rid of my father and myself so she could come back and look after Grandfather as her mother would have. I thought not. I know how she loved the city and how she neglected her own housework to read one historical novel after another. I did not mourn the way this unknown grandmother’s taste and habits of cleanliness were ignored.

I had eyes only for Grandfather who always as soon as our car had stopped was in the front yard holding out his arms for me to come running. As he lifted me up, his immense stomach pressed against me. How wonderful his stomach was, reaching out for me, never shrinking back. When he sat, it spilled forward against his legs and left little room for me to sit, but enough. I could never fall, secure in the crook of his arm. Such strength infused my limbs after one of these visits that a week or two would pass before my mother was saying “nervous little thing” about me again.

I was always an acute child, I have been told, startled by noises, offended by odors, distraught if a pianist hit a wrong note. When I began to take piano lessons myself, the poor piano had to endure kicks and scuffs from my nervous, impatient feet wanting to pay it back for those infelicities of my fingers. In spite of these difficulties which stemmed from my sensory acuteness, Grandfather accepted me with his whole being; I was secure in my favored position of namesake, secure in the knowledge that I would one day wear his silver belt buckle, engraved with our shared initials.

My mother and father would sit talking to Grandfather while he held me, telling some event from our life in the city or recalling the time when my mother and Uncle Matthew were the children of the family and vied for my place on his lap. My parents basked in the pleasure they were bringing him while Uncle Matthew, thin as a rail, glided like a ghost through the rooms; and I saw that he was very like the photograph of my dead grandmother which my mother carried in a locket around her neck, his features blurred by his quick movements: that is how I see the resemblance. It does not occur to me until many years later that he too is “nervous” or that he might be jealous of Grandfather’s love for me. Even then, I think it is hardly worth thinking about.

But I am not at all sure what Uncle Matthew’s position is. My parents always speak of the visit we make to Grandfather’s house and although they embrace and shake hands with Uncle Matthew, they never swerve from their attention to Grandfather. But they do stay up late after Grandfather and I have gone to bed talking over affairs with Uncle Matthew as I have known them to do at home when we have had visits from their old friends who lavish questions and looks on me until it is my bedtime and then when I am out of the way laugh and talk into the wee hours. I do not think so. Uncle Matthew excuses himself soon after dinner. He must get up early and drive to the geological station where he works. [The contradiction in this paragraph is a mystery.]

When Uncle Matthew calls and tells my mother that Grandfather has died in his sleep and she comes to tell my father and myself, weeping and hardly able to talk, I refuse to believe that he has died. I force myself to think of our last moments together, feeling his strong arms around my body as he carries me from the barn, not wanting my city shoes to get muddy and ruined. My short pants slide up and his belt buckle rubs against my thigh. I cry out at the coldness and he stops, looking down at my skinny legs. “What is it, little one? Oh, that, my buckle. When I die, you’ll have it to wear. I’ve told Matt you’re to have it.”

I pull a long face and squinch up my eyes, stamping my feet like a colt, wishing I could run into the pasture and be one.

“Oh, come now,” he says, always knowing exactly what I am thinking. “I’m not going to die anytime soon.” He shows me how easily the buckle unsnaps from the belt and puts it into my hand. I rub my nose across the initials (our initials) and ask why the metal is so cold.

“Because it has no life,” he says and swings me up into his arms again. “My boy, my own boy.”

When we arrive for the funeral I refuse to speak to all the Aunts and Uncles and Cousins who are filling Grandfather’s house.

“Where is he?” I demand, running from room to room, until Uncle Matthew tells my parents that he will see what he can do. He carries me to peer in the coffin; but I refuse to recognize the bodily remains, shaking my head wildly and thrashing about in his arms until he says to my parents that he will take me out to see the Blackface sheep.

I feel better away from the house full of strangers who claim to know who I am.

“You remember Mr. Farrier, my telling you about Grandfather’s friend Mr. Farrier who sold him the sheep and made the belt buckle for him?”

I nod yes. “Has he died too?”

“All of Grandfather’s friends have died; he was ready to go. We’ll miss him, you and me, but he was ready to go. He was getting very tired.”

“I don’t like it,” I say but I feel better.

“The sheep don’t like it either,” he says before we come back into the kitchen. I see pushed in a corner the great, black galoshes that Grandfather always wore flopping about his ankles when he went to feed the stock. He would carry me to the fence and set me there to watch him do his chores. “These sheep are better than a lawnmower,” he would say.

Friends and neighbors have brought in enough food to feed threshers, but someone must solve the problem of bedding down all these far-flung relatives. No one is callous enough to suggest a motel. Cots are found and dragged from the attic. Doubling-up is the order of the day.

My mother comes to me from the kitchen drying her hands as she walks through the room towards the sofa where I have burrowed into the familiar cushions, the wonderful smell of tobacco and male sweat overcoming the deadly odor of flowers which has filled the house. She gives her hands a brisk rub because she knows how I shy away from cold hands. “You are going to sleep in Uncle Matthew’s room,” she says, “And keep him company.” I am already half-asleep on the on the sofa. If only they would leave me there, cover me over with a coat or blanket or even pile the cushions over me, cover my head, let me wake up to find them all gone and only Grandfather and Uncle Matthew in the kitchen starting a fire in the wood stove. But my father must be summoned from his conversation with all these strange Aunts and Uncles to carry me up the stairs. Someone else has been assigned to the sofa.

He puts me down on a cot which has been set up at the foot of Uncle Matthew’s big double bed and leans over to kiss me goodnight. “We’re right down the hall,” he says. “I’ll look in on you before we go to bed.” They do not believe that a child should sleep in the same room as his parents or ever share their bed.

Perhaps he and my mother do look in on me, but I am fast asleep. I do not awaken until first light is entering the bedroom. Uncle Matthew is sitting on his bed in his shorts. He has taken his teeth out and his cheeks have fallen in. “Good morning,” he says and goes into the bathroom, his thin legs hairy and spindly. I remember Grandfather is dead and pull the covers over my face. I think, “If Uncle Matthew dies, so will I.” I sit bolt upright and begin to scream.

My mother and father come running into the room, barefoot and shivering. “What has happened?” my father asks.

“Nothing,” I sob.

“A nightmare,” my mother says. “Poor boy.”

My father lifts me up and carries me down the hall to their bed. My sobs are smothered in his shoulder. I fall asleep between them thinking that I have deserted Uncle Matthew. But I know that they can care for me, that the Angel of Death will not dare to visit our apartment in the city.

After the funeral when we are on our way home and they think that I am asleep in the back seat, my father says, “Old Matt hasn’t changed a bit, has he.”

“No,” my mother says and sighs. In a while she sighs again as if the years of knowing that Old Matt has not changed a bit stretched as endlessly in both directions as the road which we follow.

“Papa wanted” (she turns to see if I am still asleep and does not speak my name) “to have his silver belt buckle.”

“Matt didn’t know that, I suppose,” my father says.

“Oh yes, he did; but he knew I wouldn’t make a row about it.”

I think of Grandfather lying in his coffin with his girth circled and sealed with our initials and of Uncle Matthew going to lean over the coffin to touch Grandfather one last time and of the silver buckle in his palm, and the expression on his face as he returns to sit next to me, saying that I am not to tell and who would believe me anyway?

My mother who has cried steadily throughout the church service and at the graveside is still crying softly as she says, “It’s like everything else about funerals. As if he would ever stand again and hold us all in his arms.”

“I know, I know,” my father says. I can hear the bubbly noise that always comes before he blows his nose.

***********************************************
The next summer they decide that I am old enough to go to camp and I do not go alone again to Grandfather’s house. After our visit on the first anniversary of his death, we are never free again to drive down although my mother calls often just at 6 p.m. to see if Uncle Matthew is getting along all right. He always says that he is watching the evening news. She invites him to come visit us and tells him that I will share my bedroom with him, but he finds a million excuses for not making the trip.

On my twelfth birthday they decide that we will spend it with Uncle Matthew. As soon as we arrive and while my parents are walking about the yard (my grandmother’s roses are resurrected and full of blooms) to see how well Uncle Matthew has managed by himself, he invited me to his room and rummages in his bureau drawer until he finds a small grey jeweler’s box with the name J. Farrier printed on the satin lining of the lid. Imprisoned by a hidden catch, the silver belt buckle is difficult to lift out.

“Your grandfather wanted you to have this,” he says simply, putting the buckle into my hand. He shows what a snap the box makes when he closes it. “Like a snapping turtle.” He is trying to help me forget the coffin lid coming down so silently, closing Grandfather away from us forever and he keeps talking fast while I take off my belt and punch a new hole with the pocket knife my father has bought me for my birthday. I want to put on the buckle immediately.

“Do you remember Mr. Farrier who was Grandfather’s friend?” Uncle Matthew says.

“Yes,” I say, impatiently, as if it is the answer to an examination question. “He sold Grandfather the sheep. Right?”

When we come back downstairs and I push out my stomach so that my parents will notice the buckle immediately, my mother is dumbfounded. “All these years, I thought…” She kisses Uncle Matthew on the cheek. My father too is smiling. Uncle Matthew says it must be time for the evening news.

In some strange way, I feel that he has been defeated.

***********************************************
Several years later I am invited to a Halloween party given by one of the girls in my class at school. At the Novelty Shop where I have gone to select a costume, I linger over the wax teeth. Finally I pay for the pair which looks least ghoulish.

“There look almost as good as the real thing,” the clerk says and I want to say something funny in reply, but nothing comes to mind. I wish I had bought a rubber nose instead. I cannot bear the thought that someone (another boy at the party) will suggest the similarity of thin rubber, flesh-colored object. [That last was handwritten on the typed manuscript.]

At the party we begin by bobbing for apples, and I forget that the teeth are a part of my costume. As soon as the apple-bobbing is over we are served popcorn and candy corn and take turns telling ghost stories. All the lights are turned out for the ghost stories I am terrified of and following suit (like all fifteen-year-olds) I kiss the girls on either side of me. When the lights are turned on again the girls get out their lipsticks and giggle at the smears the boys have on their handkerchiefs.

At home undressing for bed, I forget about the teeth altogether and when the laundry is sorted they are overlooked and melted in the dryer, making unsightly grease spots all over my father’s best shirts. My mother is very distraught because she cannot understand what has happened, but I cannot bring myself to tell her. I put my hand to my throat and feel the great lump of Adam’s Apple and I fear that if I speak my voice will crack.

I long to see Uncle Matthew and reassure him of my love and friendship. I wonder if he still keeps the Blackface sheep and if he goes out to see them after the evening news and tells them what is happening in the world. “I was just watching the evening news,” he still says to my mother when she calls to see if he is getting along all right.

I roll around in my mouth the taste of love and the pleasure of love withheld. It is a taste both sweet and sour.

[Undated short story by Virginia McKinnon Mann.]

The Yellow Bowling Shirt and Other Concerns

[If you prefer, feel free to print the Google document instead of reading the story as a blog post.]



Photo by Adam Lerner.
As their plane came into the Raleigh-Durham Airport, Jaime and Evelyn expected the heavy scent of Magnolia blossoms but instead it was the sweet, heavy scent of tobacco that gave Durham its tantalizing aroma—especially tantalizing to Jaime, who had begun his sabbatical with the resolution never to smoke again.

Evelyn, who had never started, had promised to do everything in her power to help him stop. She was the perfect academic wife, Jaime thought, supportive, involved with her own research and with a bit of fun about her. Sometimes a wee bit too much fun. Teasing him by not telling where she’d put his yellow bowling shirt (JRE embroidered in brown on the breast pocket). He had wanted to wear it this weekend. He had wanted to see if Gregory would remember it from their college days, their Friday nights at the bowling alley. He had thought about that when they were packing to leave New Haven. He remembered specifically.

Evelyn had said yellow was not his best color and the shirt looked like a prime candidate for the Goodwill sack she was filling up; and he had said no matter if it did, it was an artifact from his college days, a material symbol of his friendship with Gregory. After that, she hadn’t mentioned it again. How soft the fabric had become; how faintly his old laundry number showed at the collar. That shirt had the power to soothe; not many material things had the power to soothe. He was going to relax on this sabbatical or die trying.

“You can’t expect to decompress immediately,” Gregory had said, inviting them to Morehead city to see his sailboat, the first thing he had bought the minute he got his job at Duke.

“Count on Gregory to spend his last dime on something both foolish and wonderful,” Jaime said and Evelyn giggled, “Going overboard is Gregory’s style.”

Neither of them was extravagant by nature—they had never argued over money—but it was nice to know someone who had a sailboat and wanted to share it with them. They both liked the idea of going to the coast for a weekend, before settling down to their respective projects.

********************
If the sun had been out, it would have been a day full of glare, unpleasant for driving, but it was still early. They had just listened to the news when Jaime spotted the hitch-hiker standing by the side of the road. He was very thin and very black and his plain white shirt buttoned to the neck and with no tie stood out against the slightly overcast, indistinct morning. He must have stood there holding onto his suit coat shivering while the mist was lifting on Drowning Creek, the Shake River, the Pee Dee, the Catawba, waiting for them to be on their way through the country with their spirits up, looking for adventure, enlightenment, diversion.

He didn’t usually stop for hitch-hikers (unless they were students he recognized) but on an impulse Jaime pulled to a stop and called out, “Want a ride?”

The Hitch-hiker opened the back door and got in without saying anything and sat holding onto his suit coat, a rolled-up newspaper with something inside (maybe the tie he wasn’t wearing) and a road map of the Southeastern States.

“We’re the Edwards,” Jaime said, careful not to say more, though he didn’t suppose a Ph.D. would mean much if anything to this fellow.

“Uh huh,” the Hitch-hiker said.

Evelyn smiled at Jaime. They were both interested in language, in authentic speech patterns.

“Where’re you headed?” Jaime asked when they had travelled for a while in silence.

“This road be fine,” the Hitch-hiker said.

“We’re going to Morehead City,” Jaime said, hoping to encourage a few spontaneous remarks.

“Uh huh,” the Hitch-hiker said, leaning back and taking out a pack of almost flat cigarettes.

Smoke and the sound of cellophane being stuffed into the ash tray began to fill the car. The last one in the pack, Jaime hoped.

“This is sure beautiful country,” Evelyn said. “Do you live around here?”

“No’am,” the Hitch-hiker said.

“What sort of work do you do?” Jaime asked.

“Kitchen when I can,” the Hitch-hiker said.

“That’s interesting,” Evelyn said.

The Hitch-hiker didn’t say anything. He smoked his cigarette down to nothing and then fished around in his pockets until he found another flattened out pack and pulled one of those out, spilling tobacco all over the back seat. The loose cigarette paper blazed up suddenly and in the rear view mirror it looked as if the whole back seat was going up in flames.

Thinking about the dangers of fire was one of the ways Jaime had psyched himself to quit smoking. He rolled the window down slowly and deliberately and breathed the fresh air. He was not going to freak out. He could, of course, if he chose to do so, stop the car and put the fellow out—the nameless one. Since he worked, he had a social security number and that meant he had a name because you couldn’t get a social security number without a name. But he obviously wasn’t going to divulge anything. To use Gregory’s favorite all-purpose expression, “Just forget it.” He would talk to Evelyn.

“I hope the wind will be good for sailing,” he said.

“Who cares about sailing? I just want to walk on the beach,” Evelyn said.

“What you mean,” Jaime said, putting his hand over her knee, “is that you like the way you look in your new bikini.”

She smiled back.

Evelyn was such a sweetheart. He was a fool to have picked up the Hitch-hiker; but since he had, he’d like to show Evelyn how he could get such a shy fellow to speak up. He was a challenge.

“How long you been on the road?” he asked, turning his head quickly to the back seat.

“Yesterday, but I was sleeping part of the time,” the Hitch-hiker said.

Where could he have slept in that white shirt and those front-pleated pants that had probably hung in some husband’s closet for years and years until some wife obsessed with neatness carried them off to the Goodwill. He was sure that Evelyn would not do that to him.

“You got a fishing boat?” the Hitch-hiker asked.

His voice sounded interested, alive, for the first time. If I only knew something about fishing, I could probably get him started, Jaime thought.

“My friend has a sailboat,” he said. “He calls it The Blue Devil. That’s what they call the Duke football team.”

The Hitch-hiker hunched forward and pointed out the front window at the Morehead City sign and right next to it a sign saying, “Sanitary Fish market—Good Food.”

“My uncle works there,” the Hitch-hiker said.

“We ought to have you for a guide,” Evelyn said.

Jaime pulled to a stop in front of the restaurant. Across the street was a parking lot with a sign, “Park While You Eat.”

“Where can we find the Marina?” Jaime asked as the Hitch-hiker was half out of the car. “Could you just tell us that.”

“Up past the railroad yard,” he said, backing off. “Keep going up that way and cross the tracks. You’ll find it.”

“What a relief,” Jaime said when they were out of the business district. He wanted a cigarette so badly he could taste it. “I hope he didn’t set fire to anything. See if anything’s smoldering.”

“You could have asked him not to smoke,” Evelyn said.

“I love smoking,” Jaime said. “I’d like nothing better right this minute.”

Evelyn turned her head to the window.

She didn’t understand how smoking had a soothing effect on the nerves. The total taciturnity of the Hitch-Hiker had unnerved him. He could always get students to talk. If anything, it was shutting them up that he had trouble with.

Another quarter mile of ragged asphalt blown over with sand and they were at the Marina, but damn it Gregory was nowhere to be seen. There was the restaurant where he had said they could meet, but with a CLOSED sign on the door. He needed to go to the bathroom.

“I’d be rich if I had a dime for every hour I’ve spent waiting for Gregory.” He kicked at a rock and scattered sand into his pants cuff.

“There’s a boat shop over there,” Evelyn said, walking delicately through the sand, stopping every few steps to shake out her sandals. A couple of men were hanging around smoking, watching another man clean some motor parts.

“Hi,” Evelyn said. “Do you happen to know when the restaurant opens?”

The men looked at one another and then back at Evelyn. “When the cook shows up,” one of them said.

“I could sure use a cup of tea.”

“Well, come on, little lady; we’ll see if we can fix you up.”

“Hello,” Jaime said as the men started to walk out of the shop. “We were supposed to meet a friend here and we can’t find him. He’s a tall fellow, about six-three.”

“His boat’s named ‘The Blue Devil,’” Evelyn said.

The man cleaning the motor said without looking up, “This here is part of his outfit. He’s around somewhere.”

“You mean that’s his motor?” Jaime felt sick. He saw Evelyn go into the restaurant and he walked as fast as he could in the deep sand, but the door locked shut and he had to bang with his fist until one of the men came over and unlocked it.

He went into the “Gents” room and took off his jacket, yearning again for his yellow bowling shirt. When he opened the door, he could hear Gregory talking and see his big frame draped over Evelyn.

“You’re a sight for sore eyes,” Jaime said. “What’s with your motor?”

“He promised yesterday,” Gregory said, handing Jaime his beer. “I’ll go see if they’ve got it in the boat yet.”

He was back before Jaime had had more than three swallows. “Let’s go. Bring the beer.”

“Do you have a fridge?” Evelyn asked, trying to match Gregory’s long stride.

Even in the sand he was a vigorous walker. Jaime felt tired and pulled down already.

“Everything your little heart desires,” Gregory said, putting his arm around Evelyn and delivering a running commentary on the boats they were passing—“The Roamer,” “The Mary Lou Too,” “Red Sails in the Sunset.” It was definitely not a Yacht Club kind of place.

“Do they know you’re a Duke professor?” Jaime asked?

“You don’t ask boat people what they do in real life,” Gregory said. “It’s escape, man, like cars, like stamp collecting, like model railroading…”

“No hitch-hikers on a boat,” Evelyn said, laughing. “We picked up a real weirdo on the way here.” “I wouldn’t have said weird,” Jaime said. “He was little strange; that is, he was very reticent, but I definitely wouldn’t have said weird.”

Gregory held out his hand for Evelyn to step aboard and Jaime put one foot on the deck just as it started to move off from the dock. He shifted his weight, leaped, and landed heavily on the seat where Evelyn was already curled up next to Gregory. Why was his life so full of near escapes? Why in Hell couldn’t he avoid making an ass of himself, or coming so close to it that he might as well have.

“I want to get out in the ocean,” Evelyn said, shivering with excitement.

“We won’t really be on the ocean,” Gregory said. “But we’ll get out in the channel before dark.”

“Untie us, Jaime,” Gregory called, starting the motor.

“We’re off, we’re off,” Evelyn said. “I love it.” She snuggled against Jaime and he slipped one arm from his jacket and covered her shoulders.

They passed an old barge and a boarded-up marine station. Gregory sat holding the rudder and scanning the passage. “I like this time of day,” he said. “If my running lights were working, we could stay out longer.” He shoved a fistful of popcorn into his mouth and passed the sack to Jaime.

Two things you could count on from Gregory—hungry and broke. “Our treat for dinner,” Jaime said.

“I accept,” Gregory said.

Jaime felt soothed by the water flowing by. His anxieties about smoking and his missing bowling shirt lifted, floated away. The moon was just beginning to come up. They were at sea when all sensible souls were easing into their berths and putting away gear for the night.

“It’ll be pitch dark before we know it,” Gregory said, turning the boat. “I’ll give you a proper ride tomorrow. We’ll get the sails up and head for the ocean.”

He cut the motor and they drifted in. “The best place to eat is the Sanitary Fish Market. Awful name, but the food’s good.”

“That’s where our hitch-hiker got out,” Jaime said. “His uncle works there.”

“Look at that gorgeous moon,” Evelyn said. “I don’t want to think about that strange character. We were just passing by and he wanted a ride. He didn’t want to talk to us and we were crazy to try to get him to. He didn’t want to be a research project.”

Gregory gave her a hug. “There’s nothing like sailing to take your mind off your work… I’d go nuts if I couldn’t get down here on weekends.”

Evelyn stood poised on deck ready to climb forward and tie up. She was showing off for Gregory, but who could blame her. The whole jaunt was kind of a phony excitement for them both. They really should have spent the weekend in the Library getting organized.

********************
All the way into town, Gregory never stopped talking for a minute, pointing out one historic spot after another. They were in front of the restaurant before Jaime had a chance to savor the environment.

“There he is,” Evelyn said, squeezing Jaime’s arm, “He’s parking cars.”

“Let’s go someplace else,” Jaime said, but the Hitch-hiker had already started for the car.

“Having a good visit?” Evelyn said.

“Will we be able to get out whenever we like?” Jaime asked, not taking his keys out of the ignition.

The Hitch-hiker pointed to the attendant’s shack. “On Duty Until Midnight.”

“Relax, Jaime,” Gregory said. “This is not New Haven.”

“OK, already,” Jaime said and handed over his keys.

Inside the restaurant, Gregory led the way to a table looking out over the water and ordered the food. It was the best they had had in North Carolina. Gregory explained that the restaurants in Durham were few and far between because everybody ate at home, but sea coast towns had a tourist trade to keep them going.

Jaime asked for the wine list, but Gregory said he was really out-of-touch living in Yankeeland. “This is not only the sunbelt, but the Bible Belt.”

“Love those hush-puppies,” Evelyn said.

“The food was excellent, I agree,” Jaime said. “It just would have been even better with a bottle of white wine.”

“Don’t get your water hot, ole Buddy,” Gregory said. “We’ll stop at a package store. We can sit on the beach and listen to the waves crashing.” He smiled at Evelyn. “How does that sound, Honeybun?”

“Brilliant,” she said, leading Gregory to the souvenir corner while Jaime paid the bill.

James R. Edwards, he wrote on the card and put the receipt in his pocket. He had never been audited, but he didn’t plan to tempt the IRS. And no tax on cigarettes, he noticed. That was a temptation.

When he pushed open the screen door and walked out into the starlit night, Gregory and Evelyn were standing by the car. The Hitch-hiker was nowhere to be seen. Jaime breathed a sigh of relief.

Getting in, he almost sat down on a torn-off piece of newspaper. “Here at seven-thirty in the morning if you ride back.” It was signed, if you could call it a signature, “R.R.”

Jaime looked at Evelyn. “I didn’t promise…”

“What’s your friend’s name?” he said to the attendant, handing him a dollar bill.

“He calls hisself R.R. don’t he?” The attendant looked as if he weren’t sure.

“Could you give him a message?”

“Gone,” the attendant said. “When they ride went.”

“Can you give us his telephone number?” Evelyn said.

“Not that I knows of,” the attendant said.

“Well, I’m sorry, but I didn’t make him any promises.”

Evelyn squeezed his arm. She knew he hadn’t misled the fellow.

Gregory said, “Just forget the whole thing.”

Damn. Easy enough for Gregory to say “forget it.” He never even saw “R.R.” for more than thirty seconds and didn’t take a good look at him then. Saying “forget it” was one thing; doing it was another.

After they had stopped at the Alcoholic Beverage Control store and Jaime had bought a bottle and some plastic cups, they drove for another half a mile.

“What a strange system,” Jaime said. “You can buy cigarettes for almost nothing in a restaurant, but you can’t buy a bottle of wine.”

Evelyn tugged at his arm. “This is far enough. I want to get on the beach.”

Jaime let himself be carried along like a jellyfish—following their directions to pull off the road, climbing up and sliding down a small dune until they were on the hardpacked sand, whitened by the bright moon and lines of foam washed up by the tide. Never leaving him alone for a minute, Evelyn and Gregory opened the wine and toasted Yale, Duke, The Blue Devil, the Moon, Friendship until his head was spinning. They kept saying, “Look at the sandpipers, Jaime, and put this beautiful shell in your pocket” not seeming to notice the mood he had sunk in, miserable and mad with himself, with Evelyn for hiding his bowling shirt somewhere and with the Hitch-hiker counting on him for a ride in the morning. He wished that he were already back in Durham, lying between cool, clean sheets, reading over what he had written this week. Not everybody needed constant stimulation. Not everybody liked libraries with open shelves and students lounging all over with their shoes off.

“I love the sound of the ocean,” Evelyn said. “It’s so primeval.”

“Yeah,” Gregory said. “You feel that especially when you’re sailing. You’re going to like that.”

The wet sand clung to the inside of Jaime’s socks and to the inside of his shoes. He felt sand in his hair and inside his mouth. His lips were salty and his cheeks felt drawn tight.

Gregory poured out the last of the wine and said, “Let’s go.” When they got to the Marina he jumped out of the car and started loping towards his berth. “I’ll come by for breakfast.”

“Sleep well,” Evelyn called out.

“Think of it,” she said when they had backed away from the Marina and were following the dark road, turning quietly into the pine-strewn parking space. “Sleeping on a boat.” She leaned her head against Jaime’s shoulder. “Rocked in the cradle of the deep.”

By the time he got the sand washed out of his hair and feet, Evelyn was dead to the world. He almost went downstairs to the Office to see if they had a cigarette machine. Instead, he lay in bed tossing and turning, trying to think about something to relieve his anxiety, something that would help him relax. He thought of the wonderful crack a bowling ball makes when it hits the king pin and the wood falls to a strike. He thought of the neatness of two black lines intersecting in a tiny square, the neatness of a perfect score. Evelyn couldn’t have taken the bowling shirt out of his suitcase and put it in the Goodwill sack. It wouldn’t be like her to do something dastardly like that.

He tried to let his mind go blank, but the madhouse scene just before they drove to the airport came back in excruciating detail. He had just folded his bowling shirt and put it in his suitcase when the doorbell rang. Evelyn called out form the kitchen and he went to the door. There was the man from Goodwill shuffling from one foot to the other, not saying a word, until Evelyn handed him the bulging Goodwill sack. When he went back to the bedroom, Evelyn had already closed his suitcase. That’s how it had happened. He would never see his yellow bowling shirt again.

He fell asleep exhausted and dreamed that he bowled 300, but that as soon as he wrote down his score, the numbers disappeared.

First thing when he awoke in the morning and heard the ocean pounding, pounding, and the sea birds piping and screeching, it came to him quickly, instinctually, that he would go the Sanitary Fish Market and see if R.R. were really there waiting for him.

He looked at Evelyn and saw that she was still in the prolonged sleep that was her unassailable talent. She and Gregory could have a fantastic day sailing while he could go back to Durham and get some work done. Dressing carefully, he thought out the note he would write and slipped a fifty into an envelope.

He eased the car out without looking back. He longed for the sweet tobacco odor that hung over Durham. R.R. was standing where he’d said he would be. He smiled when Jaime opened the car door, settling himself in without a word, not asking what had happened to Evelyn. Jaime wondered if he even remembered she had been in the car.

After they had turned out of the business district and were well on their way into the country, passing field after field grown up with scrub pine, Jaime said into the silence, “What do your initials stand for? Ronald, Roy, Randall, Richard, Robert?”

“The way it happened,” R.R. said, a slow smile crossing his face. “Before I was born, this man my mother worked for said, ‘When your child is born if you’ll name him Rolls Royce’—he run a car garage—‘I’ll give you five dollars.’ She said she could use the five dollars. Some call me Royce, some call me R.R.”

Jaime glanced sideways as R.R. took his cigarettes out and reached for the ashtray.

“Let me have one of those, will you,” Jaime said, flexing his hands on the steering wheel and then pushing in the lighter for them both.

“Royce,” he said. “I’ll call you Royce.”

[Undated short story by Virginia McKinnon Mann.]