Carolina Moon (12 page)

I said, “Maybe we can,” and I have to say I was feeling a lot like I did in the movies that day and hating myself for it. “So back to where we were, what do you think?”

“About?”

“Me! What do you think of me? Now that you’ve seen me, ratty underwear and all, I deserve to hear. Otherwise I’ll tell Quee you were spying on me.” I began talking to him the same way I had talked to Gerald, matter-of-fact and direct. “I’ll file a report of some kind.”

“I think you’re very pretty.” He smiled when he said this, and I sat down in my little bedroom chair and crossed my legs tightly. I tried to angle myself so that he couldn’t see that I had not shaved my legs in ages. Gerald
despises
hairy legs, which of course is precisely why they are in this state. “I’ll confess I don’t really like the robe.” He stood there with his chin cupped in his hand while he looked me up and down like I might be some ancient urn.

Now here, dear tape recorder, and you, whoever you are out there in recorderland, this is where I really screwed up. I mean why didn’t I say in low, guttural Kathleen Turner fashion: “Fine then, baby, I’ll take it off.” But no, I did what I always do and have my whole life, I
got my nose out of joint and felt the need to defend myself, to state my case, to persuade him to look at it from my window. “Why? What’s wrong with it? I bought it in Chinatown, and it wasn’t cheap.”

“It looks a little cheap, though, a little hookerish,” he said and then, as if that wasn’t enough, proceeded to let me know—as if I was interested!!—that he really sort of liked that All-American, sweet-girl look, he always had. “No offense,” he said and then, “I’m just not into games.”

“Oh no? Oh no?” and I realized that I was picking up the same anger I left behind in Washington and was finishing up the job. “Then what was all that about ‘Maybe we could work something out’ when I said I liked some suffering?”

“It was a joke.” He pulled this innocent-as-all-hell routine and held his hands up in the air as if to ward off blows. “Just something to say.” He breathed out, shoulders dropping. “Look, I’m sorry. I should have left when I started to. I haven’t flirted in a while; the truth is, I really am not interested in flirting or being seduced or any of that.”

“Like I am?” I was screaming by now, you can just imagine how pissed I was. “Why would I want to pick up some two-bit odd-job redneck? Who’s coming on to who, Buddy?”

“Well, think about it, and you tell me. And you don’t even know me. I’m not some redneck sent to serve your fat ass. I’m
not
a redneck!” He placed his hand on his chest and stepped back. “Man, are you crazy. You’re as crazy as Quee said you were. That’s one lucky husband left to himself.”

I froze. I literally froze. The blood stopped running, and I turned my back completely on him so that he wouldn’t see how humiliated I felt. I hadn’t felt so humiliated since my wedding night, when Gerald informed me that he felt he could get used to my being so flatchested, that on his list of what he wanted in a woman it wasn’t the
only one I failed (he said the others were that I didn’t like to drink cognac in front of a fire while he read aloud to me from his own work). I told him that somebody who chooses not to drink alcohol would not up and start slugging cognac, that nobody in his right mind would sit in front of a roaring fire in Virginia in July, and that his work was often too difficult for me to follow in the air, I preferred to read it for myself. On the day I left, I told him that his shit work was boring as hell, that it was almost as boring as he was, that it is so boring, somebody could sell it out as sleeping medication. And of course, being a know-it-all who had to get the last word, he told me that he had always found my body so unattractive, that dealing with my breasts was kind of like gnawing on a bone some other dog got to first (he said this in what he thought was a rugged kind of cowboy voice but really sounded like Liberace having a tantrum). He said that he had always planned to buy me some lovely big breasts. I told him to buy himself some, that it seemed to me he might be much better suited to the transexual life.

“I’m sorry.” Tom was right up near me then, but boy there was not a pheromone in the place. The pheromones just up and damn croaked. Where have all the pheromones gone, long time passing? They were out of there. And I’ll tell you right now, you whoever, archaeologist, visitor from another planet, museum curator, local cop, my butt is NOT that big. It looks bigger than it actually is.

“Quee never said you were crazy. Really.” I didn’t answer him, just stared at that old muddy brogan of his that probably
was
about the size of what my brogan would be if I had a brogan. “She told me what happened to you, that’s all. I’m sorry, really.” I just shrugged, because what else in the hell can you do. I planned to say nothing, but then it was like I snapped—it’s like the absence of pheromones sent me. I said, “Fuck you, you fucked-up fucker.” I said it several times, again
and again and now it was his turn to stand there like a drainpipe. He let me finish, he let my breath slow back down; he didn’t even tell me that during all of this my robe had slid open and I was standing there flashing him.

“Do you need a thesaurus?” he asked, reached and pulled my robe back up around me. When I made no move at all, he retied my belt and then stepped back several feet. He waited, eyebrows still raised with the question. All of a sudden I felt kind of good, like I’d up and let all of this bad stuff out of me. I felt lifted, unburdened. I thought of what a thesaurus might say. “Fornicate you, you fornicated-up fornicator.”

He laughed.

“Copulate you.”

“Sure,” he said. I’m telling you that there are more pheromones to be found in one pore on that perfect face than Gerald could get if he was able to buy some at the Dollar Store. “Truce?” he asked then, and I nodded. I let him kiss my hand like I might have been the Queen Mother. Then he turned and told me he’d be back the next day to finish my shelves, that he’d be sure to knock first. Now maybe I’m reading too much into this, but it seems to me that he really lingered over kissing my hand. I think he was really attracted to me, and I wish you could talk, you old tape recorder, and give me some kind of opinion. I mean, would I be jumping right from the fire into the pan? I mean, I don’t even know this guy, and here I was getting all worked up, you know? I mean, I don’t know if that’s
normal
, and I wish I did, seeing as how I’m going into the business of what’s normal and what isn’t. Oh, but Lordy, it was something to behold.

I felt the pheromones resurrecting. Immediately, all over the room they were springing back, crying out
Let me live, let me live! Let me do those things you said
. And I think maybe he felt it too, because when he
walked out into the yard he walked right through the sprinkler, held his arms out and let himself get a nice long spray before climbing into his truck and giving his dog a great big kiss. I would swear that he was looking up at my window as he pulled off, and I know that he’ll be back; he said he would. Now as a professional, I just don’t know what I’ll do about this. As a woman I have a few ideas. But for now I’ve got to go finish listening to Quee. Later when I talk to you, I’m going to tell all about some of my therapy techniques that I have developed; there’s the jigsaw test and the battery of tests I think of as the Flora and Fauna of the Mental Landscape. But tonight we are going to rehearse my future speech that will target the impotence that comes to many male smokers. She says she has worked weeks on the ceramic learning aids to illustrate what happens. Lord, these must be some dim bulbs I’m working with if they can’t imagine what a limp one might look like.

Part Two

Sometimes when Wallace Johnson takes his break in the afternoon, he angles himself so that he can watch the cars heading down Highway 211 to the beach, read a letter or two. It amazes him how he never gets tired of reading over the same words. It’s like when he was a boy and buying pulps. Maybe part of what keeps him reading is because it’s an unsolved mystery. During the twenty years since that first letter, this poor soul has lost her lover and then her husband; she’s had boyfriends, but nobody she really cares about. No family really. She’s one of those unfortunate ones who never really got to have a childhood. She was always working, always feeling responsible.

Now he turns his attention to the window where there is a steady gray mist. He’ll take tomorrow off and Saturday and then he’ll be right back at the crack of dawn on Sunday to start all over again. He doesn’t mind at all.
Almost there, almost there
, sometimes he hears the words in his cash register or in the rhythm of how he stamps the postage. Retirement. It equals fishing and reading and building the deck that Judy has talked about for years.

The land alongside the highway here is known as Lamb’s Folly,
story being that old man Lamb built himself a huge beautiful ship, spent his whole life building it, only to then realize that there was no possible way to get it out of the clearing and to the sea without cutting down a forest of trees and all the homes that surrounded him. Old Lamb’s Folly. Who knew if it was true, but it sure made a good story. Every time he drove his family on this stretch, which was near about every weekend, he’d say, “Did I ever tell you the story of Lamb’s Folly?” And they’d all groan and moan and laugh. For years his sons begged him to take them up into the woods to search for the ship, but of course he didn’t. In his mind there was no touching it. It was as big as the Ark. It was as fancy as the
QE II
. It was a myth, a legend, the kind of thing you can pin a life on if the rest of the world will let you.

He stares out into the rain and wishes that he could see the woman of the letters there in her red scarf. He wishes that she could pick her way through Lamb’s Woods and that somewhere there, deep in the heart of it, she would stumble onto her Wayward One—that he wasn’t really dead at all. He was there in this lost and hidden city waiting for her, waiting for a new life to begin.

WINTERTIME
1970

Dear Wayward One,

It’s three o’clock in the morning and I have driven myself down here to the beach to be close to you. It’s kind of eerie as I sit here at the end of the pier, the light from a nearby post giving me just enough to see what I’m doing. There is no moon. I was hoping there would be. There is the occasional light from the Fort Caswell Lighthouse, that beacon searching the strand. As a young woman I was made to think it was searching for lost souls, calling the sinners over to a Baptist retreat, washing their stains with cold salt water. Now as I look down toward the point (I have a flashlight in my purse should I get up the nerve to walk down there) I keep expecting to see you there standing out on the top step. I guess you might know that the folks who own that house hate you for killing yourself there. I don’t anymore. Tonight as I bent down and kissed my husband I had the strange sensation that I was two people living two lives, at least two! I think I’m really like an old alley cat, a big old pussycat with one life blending right into the next. I feel like I have been everything, done everything. I guess the only thing I never was was a mother by nature, but don’t we all know that there are other ways to
mother. There are mothers who have produced child after child in their stretched-out wombs; they have sweated and squeezed those muscles to push them out into the world and to someone like me it seems that would make a difference, that it would change them deep in their souls, but apparently not. My mother grew me in her body; I came headfirst from between her thighs and then where was she? WHERE? All those times I needed her there for me and WHERE? There I was at the Ocean Forest and to all the world didn’t I look fit? Didn’t I look like somebody with a good life? I went from being somebody who practically lived up under a house to being somebody with a step-daddy who took me to spend a whole summer there at Myrtle Beach. You said you remembered meeting him. Well, a lot of people probably do; he was something, all right. My mother thought he was God. I never got over wanting my own daddy, the one I could barely remember by then. I knew kind sad eyes and I knew the scent of bourbon though as a child I could not have described either to you. It was just my way of knowing something. It’s how I imagine people who have always been blind remember the world.

You know I thought you were God, for a time at least. I wanted you but then I also hated you for leaving behind a child who might grow up to feel just as I did about being left. I’ve seen your child playing ball over at the junior high and I think “Oh honey, you would hate me if you knew who I was. You would call me whore and witch.” But instead he looks at me and smiles and waves great big like all the children do. He is beautiful, too. Perfect. There’s a part of me that wants him. Not like you’re thinking! I mean
want
him. I wish he did love me the way a child loves its mother. I wonder if it could ever happen? Your wife waves to me that same way. She hasn’t a clue Dear Wayward One. I am sitting here looking for a sign I guess. I keep thinking that if there is something beyond this life, beyond my nine lives, that you’ll find it and of course I know that if you find it, you’ll let me know. I’ll find a seashell in my
mailbox or I’ll find the rest of the note you were writing to me just before you died. Maybe I’ll find my red chiffon scarf tied around my bedpost and it will smell just like you. The last time I was here you were beside me and it was at this same time of day. We weren’t worried. If somebody saw us, they wouldn’t know who we were, not at this hour, not here on the pier. This is a time and place for the serious fishermen, the ones who sometimes sleep here at the foot of the pier. The old men who know what they’re doing and the teenagers who dream of catching a shark and drinking liquor all night. That morning there was a moon and we sat with it to our right, the sky lightening on our left. It was almost a full moon and you talked about how even though you knew that there was a flag up there on it, and that men had landed and walked and taken close-up photos that appeared in
Life
magazine, you still felt complete magic when you looked at it. It had the power to take your world and shake it up, let the insignificant sift through like in those little plastic sieves the children play with at the beach; it still had the power to make you catch your breath and think how simple life
should
be. You wake and eat and sleep and love. Anything beyond this is unnecessary. I listened to you then. I believed your every brilliant word. I held your hand and stroked your fingers, pressed them to my cheek as you talked. We got corny then, remember? You said, “Here’s old blue eyes” and you sang “Paper Moon.”