I Wish I Had a Red Dress (12 page)

I HADN’T HEARD FROM
Nate since our exchange at the gas station the day before, but when I got home, his voice was the first one on my answering machine. It was so deep, I had to adjust the volume to bring up the rumble.

“Joyce?” he said, sounding like I imagine Barry White sounds when he just wakes up in the morning. “It’s Nate. Just wanted to say—”

He stopped abruptly and there was a long pause, followed by what sounded like a low chuckle or not too distant thunder. This man even laughed large.

“What do I want to say? I guess just that you made me consider some things the other night, standing by the side of the road—” Another pause. “And I don’t think, no! I
know
I wouldn’t have thought about them at all if you hadn’t pulled my coat, so—”
Pause. “So, thanks. I guess that’s what I wanted to say. Thanks for taking the time, you know, and not just assuming I’m a macho fool who can’t . . . who can’t deal with a woman as a full equal.”

Another pause. I was right. He was definitely a product of some prolonged exchanges with some serious women who had taken time with him. If all women’s studies classes ever do is get a man or two to hesitate, however briefly, like Nate was doing, before deciding they automatically know more/better/best, just on the basis of
maleness,
those programs will be worth all the struggles it took to get them.

“So thanks,” he finished up quickly. “And I hope we can do some work together and maybe even be . . . friends.”

I ran the message back a couple of times to check the tone of voice, study the nuances and duration of each pause. It was beautiful. A readmission of his initial confusion, an offering of his gratitude to me for providing new and useful information, all topped off with an offer to be friends.
This guy was good
.

The only other message was from the Smitherman twins.

“Hello, dear.” Geneva’s sweet contralto voice greeted me with just the barest tremble of age. “We’re back! Thank you so much for looking after everything and how wonderful to know you’ve rented the house already.” I had left them a note and a copy of Nate’s letter of intent. “Our trip truly wore us out, so we’re turning in early, so you don’t need to call tonight, but come by and see us in the morning on your way in. We’ve missed you!”

“And bring some sugar,” Lynette called quickly just before the click.

I wrote myself a note so I wouldn’t forget and propped it against the sugar bowl. I had missed them too, plus their timing couldn’t have been better. It gave me a reason to call Nate. Somebody had to introduce him to his landladies, right?

THE SMITHERMAN TWINS HAVE
been here so long nobody can remember when they weren’t, beautiful and brilliant, elegantly ensconced in their large lakefront house, tending their garden and each other with equal delicacy and care. Their father was a gangster who made a fortune during Prohibition and ran several successful speakeasies in Detroit over the years. He also operated a legendary Idlewild club that was famous for its Creole food and spacious dance floor. Labor Day weekend, you couldn’t get a table unless Mr. Smitherman knew you, or Mrs. Smitherman thought you might be a good catch for one of her daughters, who, to her constant annoyance, seemed completely uninterested in anybody’s company but their own.

At seventy plus, they were still each other’s best friend. They spent four or five months a year traveling, including their annual
sojourn to New York and Chicago, which allowed them to indulge a shared passion for theater and fine dining. It also afforded them an opportunity to catch up with a tiny circle of very old friends with similar shadowy backgrounds. All were equally independent and equally ancient women who sometimes pulled up at the Smithermans’ in their chauffeur-driven limos for a surprise overnighter on their way to Miami for the season or Atlanta to see their grandchildren.

It was a rarefied and exclusive little club, these pampered daughters of men whose fortunes had been made so long ago nobody was alive who remembered the specifics. They never used the word
gangster,
and in front of them, neither did anybody else. I always thought of Mr. Smitherman as a businessman. When my dad decided to move here, it was Mr. Smitherman’s old club site that he bought to renovate and reopen as his own. After I had so much death in my family, the twins made it their business to keep me from going off the deep end, which is right where I was headed. Survivor guilt can be terminal if you let it. I can’t begin to tell you how many nights they insisted I stay in one of their big empty bedrooms so they could feed me dinner and tuck me in and assure me that
yes,
I was allowed to live through it.

“Nobody ever died of a broken heart,” Lynette would say, although in those days I thought my chances were about fifty/fifty.

“You can’t afford to go yet,” Geneva would remind me, kissing me good night like I was her child instead of her friend. “You still have work to do.”

When they’re in town, I usually see them every couple of days. Since their house is directly across the lake from mine, in good weather, I can watch them do their t’ai chi on the deck, but
today they were inside by the fire, drinking strong coffee and listening to Dinah Washington singing “Unforgettable.” Even at eight o’clock the first morning after their arrival, they were up and fully dressed in good wool skirts and cardigan sweater sets. They looked like teachers, although neither one had ever held a full-time job. Their parents allowed them to go to college, but working for a living was out of the question.

“Well, aren’t you a sight for sore eyes!” Geneva, the oldest twin by ten minutes, greeted me with a smile, drawing me inside to her sister. “Look who’s here, Nettie.”

Lynette Smitherman was sitting on their old Victorian sofa with a giant scrapbook open on her lap and an art deco footstool at her feet. Their furniture was all from another era, but not necessarily the same one.

“Thank goodness,” she said, throwing up her hands in exasperation. “Maybe you can recognize some of these Negroes!”

“Which Negroes are those?” I said, slipping off my coat and going to look.

“We’re trying to get organized.” Geneva chuckled at her sister’s well-known impatience and sat back down beside her. “Our first task is to get the old scrapbooks in some kind of order.” She gestured vaguely at a huge stack of photograph albums on the floor beside them. “Some of these belonged to mother, so you know how long ago that was!”

“How many have you got?”

“Too many!” Lynette said. “We haven’t even been back a good twenty-four hours and now, just because she couldn’t recognize some people we haven’t seen in forty years, Gen thinks we’ve got to turn this place into the Library of Congress and start labeling everything in sight.”

“Welcome back,” I said, sitting down on her other side and looking at the pages she was perusing with not only her own bifocals, but a huge magnifying glass whose ivory handle was elaborately carved into the shape of an elephant. Their house was filled with exotic mementos of their travels. I knew, for example, that this elephant had come all the way from a teeming marketplace in the middle of central Ceylon.

Lynette was using the glass to examine two large photographs on facing pages, both from some long-ago formal event being held at what was probably the Lot Owner’s Club House. Both pictures were carefully posed with smiling women in satin gowns seated in a semicircle on folding chairs while their tuxedo-clad husbands stood behind them, looking as handsome as they ever would—and knowing it.

“We had a little reunion this trip,” Geneva said. “Dolly Barthwell passed and we wanted to have a little toast for her.”

“Champagne,” Lynette said, turning another page. “Dolly would only drink champagne.”

Geneva nodded. “So a couple of people brought their scrapbooks, and when we started going through them, we realized we couldn’t remember everybody’s name anymore.”

Lynette harrumphed at that. “Which is no great tragedy,” she said. “I didn’t remember most of their names back then either!”

“But I did,” Geneva said gently. “And I want to again. What good is a photograph if you can’t remember who’s in it?”

“Anybody in here look familiar to you?” Lynette turned toward me.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I think this was before my time.”

They looked startled, and then they laughed softly together.

“What?”

“Nothing, dear,” Geneva said. “It’s just that sometimes we forget how old we are.”

“These photographs ought to remind us,” Lynette grumbled.

“If you stop complaining,” Geneva said. “I’ll make you a fresh pot of coffee.”

Lynette’s eyes lit up. “Done! I’ll be quiet as a mouse.”

“How about you, dear?” Gen said to me. “Will you join us for a cup?”

“Thank you,” I said, remembering the small packet of sugar in my coat pocket and handing it over. I’m primarily a tea drinker, but the Smitherman sisters only drink black coffee with lots of sugar. They told me once that when they were little girls, their father kept very late hours, and their mother was determined to be up and awake whenever he came home, no matter what the hour, so she drank a lot of coffee. It was years later that they realized she was always afraid he wouldn’t come home at all. For them, the smell conjures up memories of their mother and father talking softly about the day just passed while most of their friends’ parents were just getting up to make the five o’clock shift at General Motors or Ford.

“Here’s one I’ll bet you recognize,” she said, and I looked over into my father’s smiling face.

I recognized the photograph. My mother took it, and I have the framed original on my mantel at home. It was the opening of Daddy’s club, and all his friends were there, wearing new tuxedos. They would never again be quite as certain that they were the men they wanted to be, but that night you couldn’t tell them they weren’t royalty. My father gave them that for one small moment, and they loved him for it until the day he died.

“Alonzo Harris,” I said, pointing at each one in turn. “Mershall
Graham, Cunningham Beardon, Charlie Jones, Oscar Hand and Daddy.”

Lynette nodded. “That was an impressive group of men gathered at your father’s place. They looked like kings.”

I remember that night so well. The place was packed. The band was hired all the way from Detroit. Everybody was dressed to the nines and Mitch kissed me for the first time while my parents were busy greeting their other guests.

“You think we’ll ever have a time like that again?” I said. “When this really feels like a paradise for colored people?”

Lynette shook her head firmly. “You can get rid of that idea, dear. It’s never going to be that way again. Not like it was.”

“Why not?” I said. “The same things that drew people here before are still here. Same woods, same water.”

“Negroes are different now,” Lynette said. “We used to
want
to be with our own kind. We needed that fellowship, that camaraderie, that mirror of what we really were, no matter what we had to pretend to be out there trying to make a living wage.”

She pointed to the photograph of another group in tuxedos. “In real life, you know what these men did for a living?” Her slender finger touched each face gently. “This one was a janitor in a high school. This one worked at the Ford assembly plant for forty years. This one was a superstar at the post office, just like your dad.”

In the photograph, they looked like heads of state, businessmen, educators, leaders; their best selves shone through like new money.

“And what happened?” She closed the scrapbook with a snap and looked at me. “Why did people stop coming here?”

This was a familiar topic in Idlewild, especially among the oldsters, and I was sorry I had introduced it. I wanted to tell
them about Nate, not rehash our theories about what happened to paradise.

“I’ll tell you what happened.” Lynette was getting increasingly agitated and there were small spots of color on each of her ivory-colored cheeks. “They decided they’d rather be with white folks instead of each other.
Self-hatred,
pure and simple! That’s all it is!”

“Hush, Nettie,” Geneva said, coming in with the coffee on a small silver tray. “It’s too early in the morning for you to be that cynical.”

“What’s the time of day got to do with it?” Lynette shot back. “You think anything’s going to change between now and noon?”

“Yes,” Geneva said, handing her sister one steaming mug and me another. “Your disposition.”

She slid the scrapbook away from Nettie and placed it back on the stack nearby. “Take a break so Joyce can tell us about our new tenant.”

Lynette was only too happy to comply. She took a long swallow of coffee that was still too hot for me to do anything but sip and nodded approvingly. “Best idea you’ve had all morning. I had almost forgotten about him.”

“What’s he like?” Geneva said. “He wrote a lovely letter.”

“He’s the new vice principal at the high school,” I said. “Just got here from Detroit when a slot opened up. I met him at Sister’s house last week. He seems really nice, loves his work and . . .”

I stopped myself. Was telling them how big he was appropriate? What difference did it really make? Besides, mentioning it might make them focus there when they otherwise might not even notice, although the chances of that were pretty slim. He was taller than everybody else around here by at least a foot.

“What is it, dear?” Geneva said gently. “What’s wrong?”

Lynette frowned slightly. “Don’t you like him?”

“Yes, yes, I do,” I reassured them quickly. “I like him very much—so do Sister and Bill. He’s just very . . .
tall.
”

Their faces were immediately full of surprise and curiosity. “How tall?” They said in unison.

“Pretty tall,” I said. “He’s six foot eight.”

“Oh, my goodness!” Geneva said with a gentle chuckle. “That’s tall all right.”

“And he’s kind of big too,” I said. “He lifts weights.”

They exchanged a glance. “You didn’t rent our place to a bodybuilder, did you, dear?”

“No,” I said, laughing at what a mess I was making of a simple introduction. “I just didn’t want you to be startled when you meet him. Sister didn’t warn me, and when I turned around and saw him, I’m sure I was visibly surprised.”

“I can’t wait to see him,” Lynette said, sipping her coffee. “I haven’t seen anybody that tall since we met Wilt Chamberlain.”

“You met Wilt Chamberlain?” I was amazed sometimes at the names they dropped into casual conversation.

Geneva nodded, smiling. “Nettie was so fresh. She followed the man around all night.”

“I wasn’t being fresh. I had never been close to another human being anywhere near that size. It was mysterious to me and, actually, quite wonderful.”

“You weren’t one of his twenty thousand, were you?” I said, teasing her about Chamberlain’s legendary sexual prowess.

Lynette just lifted her finely chiseled chin and sniffed regally. “I’ve never been one of twenty thousand
anything.
”

“I stand corrected,” I said, laughing again and reaching for my coat. “I’ve got to go. Welcome home! I missed you two.”

“We missed you too, dear,” they said, walking with me to the door. “Bring Mr. Anderson by to see us soon, all right?”

“Of course,” I said. “Just don’t tell him I already warned you about how tall he is. It might make him self-conscious.”

“Our lips are sealed,” said Geneva, but Lynette just smiled.