Love (8 page)

4

BENEFACTOR

Heed eased down into the froth, hanging on to the tub’s rim with a practiced use of her thumbs. Once on her knees she could turn, sit, and watch the lilac foam rise to her shoulders.

This can’t last, she thought. I’m going to sink or slip and not have the wrist strength to save myself from drowning.

She hoped Junior’s list of things she was willing to do—“You want your hair fixed, I’ll fix it. You want a bath, I’ll give you one”—was honest, not the eager lies of a job hunter. Heed decided to test her on the hairdressing before asking for help with her bath. July was the last time she had been able to hold the Clairol bottle and flood the silver seams at her scalp with Deep Walnut. How, she wondered, how had it happened that she, who had never picked a crab, handled crawfish or conch, ended up with hands more deformed than those of the factory workers who had. Ben-Gay, aloe, Aspercreme did little to help, and constant bathing was needed to stop the sea life she had never touched from touching her. So the first two tasks for Junior would be to color her hair and help in the bath—assuming she could get her attention away from Romen long enough.

She didn’t need to know what Junior had said to him. Watching the boy’s face from her bedroom window, Heed thought the girl may as well have shouted. His grin, his eyes gone liquid. Soon the two of them would be coiled together right under her nose. In the garage under a quilt. No. Junior was bold. She would sneak him into her bedroom, or some other room. Christine might not like it. Or maybe she wouldn’t care. If she was feeling hateful or jealous, she would tear them up. If her slut history reared itself, she might enjoy it. Nobody knew which way the gray-eyed cat would jump. On her ninth life, Lord willing. Heed thought it a good thing, this baby romance, a way to keep the girl on the premises once she found out there was no way to steal. It was enough that Christine was pilfering the household money to pay that lawyer. A little backseat fumbling might loosen up Romen too. Yank him out of Vida’s clamp. He was so tight around the mouth. “Yes, ma’am. No, ma’am. No thank you, I have to be home by streetlights.” What had Vida and Sandler told him about her? About Christine? Whatever they’d said, it wasn’t so awful they didn’t want him to work there. Just don’t get too familiar, Vida would say. But if Romen had reasons of his own to hang around, he could be more useful than he already was. He had followed her instructions perfectly when she dictated the
Harbor Journal
ad. Junior’s thief-smarts would teach him the strut he needed to manage Vida and stop treating everybody old enough to pay taxes as an enemy and old women, in particular, as fools.

Heed was used to that. Depended on it, in fact. Trusting that whoever answered her ad would need money, she’d been lucky that the first and only applicant was slick as well as greedy. They had postured for each other last night, and while Miss Viviane was busy casing the room, Heed was busy casing her; while she was busy taking control, Heed was letting her believe she already had it. Her insight was polished to blazing by a lifetime of being underestimated. Only Papa knew better, had picked her out of all he could have chosen. Knowing she had no schooling, no abilities, no proper raising, he chose her anyway while everybody else thought she could be run over. But here she was and where were they? May in the ground, Christine penniless in the kitchen, L haunting Up Beach. Where they belonged. She had fought them all, won, and was still winning. Her bank account was fatter than ever. Only Vida had done fairly well with her life and that was because of Sandler, who had never mocked or insulted Bill Cosey’s wife. He had respected her even when his own wife did not. It was he who came to her asking if she would hire his grandson. Polite. Staying for iced coffee in her bedroom. Vida would never have done that. Not just because she disliked Heed, but also because she was afraid of Christine—as she should be. The knife flashed at Cosey’s funeral was real, and rumors of Christine’s sloppy life included brawls, arrests, torching cars, and prostitution. There was no telling what a mind trained to gutter life would think of.

It was impossible that no one knew of the fights between them when Christine returned to take up permanent residence. Most were by mouth: quarrels about whether the double
C
’s engraved on the silver was one letter doubled or the pairing of Christine’s initials. It could be either, because Cosey had ordered the service after his first marriage but long before his second. They argued about twice-stolen rings and the real point of sticking them under a dead man’s fingers. But there were also bruising fights with hands, feet, teeth, and soaring objects. For size and willingness Christine should have been the hands-down winner. With weak hands and no size, Heed should have lost every match. But the results were a tie at the least. For Heed’s speed more than compensated for Christine’s strength, and her swift cunning—anticipating, protecting, warding off—exhausted her enemy. Once—perhaps twice—a year, they punched, grabbed hair, wrestled, bit, slapped. Never drawing blood, never apologizing, never premeditating, yet drawn annually to pant through an episode that was as much rite as fight. Finally they stopped, moved into acid silence, and invented other ways to underscore bitterness. Along with age, recognition that neither one could leave played a part in their unnegotiated cease-fire. More on the mark was their unspoken realization that the fights did nothing other than allow them to hold each other. Their grievances were too serious for that. Like friendship, hatred needed more than physical intimacy; it wanted creativity and hard work to sustain itself. The first fight, interrupted in
1971
, signaled the will to claw each other. It began when Christine stole from Heed’s desk the jewelry Papa had won in a card game—a paper bag of engagement rings he agreed to try to fence for a drummer with a police record. Rings Christine pretended she wanted to place in Papa’s hands in his coffin. Four years later she pushed her way into Heed’s house holding a shopping bag with fingers loaded with that collection of other women’s hopes; demanding rights and the space to take care of May, her sick mother—the same mother she had been laughing at for years when she took the trouble to think about her at all. Immediately the postponed fight resumed and remained intermittent for a decade. When they searched for more interesting means of causing pain they had to rely on personal information, things they remembered from childhood. Each thought she was in charge. Christine because she was strappingly healthy, could drive, go about, and run the house. Heed, however, knew she was still in charge, still winning, not only because she had the money but because she was what everybody but Papa assumed she was not: smart. Smarter than the petted one, the spoiled one miseducated in private school, stupid about men, unequipped for real work and too lazy to do it anyway; a parasite feeding off men until they dumped her and sent her home to gnaw the hand she ought to be licking.

Heed was sure she knew Christine better than Christine knew herself. And notwithstanding an acquaintanceship merely twelve hours old, she knew Junior too, and now she knew what the sexpot was thinking: how to fool an arthritic old woman, how to use her to satisfy and hide her cravings. Heed knew all about that too, about cravings sharp enough to bring tears of rage to grown-up eyes. Like May’s when she learned who her father-in-law would marry. And young eyes. Like Christine’s when she knew her best friend was the chosen one. Both of them, mother and daughter, went wild just thinking about his choice of an Up Beach girl for his bride. A girl without a nightgown or bathing suit. Who had never used two pieces of flatware to eat. Never knew food to be separated on special plates. Who slept on the floor and bathed on Saturday in a washtub full of the murky water left by her sisters. Who might never get rid of the cannery fish smell. Whose family salvaged newsprint not for reading but for the privy. Who could not form a correct sentence; who knew some block letters but not script. Under those circumstances, she had to be braced every minute of the day. Papa protected her, but he wasn’t around all the time or in every place where people could mess with her, because May and Christine were not the only ones, as a particular afternoon proved. With the necessary prowess of the semiliterate, Heed had a flawless memory, and like most nonreaders, she was highly numerate. She remembered not only how many gulls had come to feed off a jellyfish but the patterns of their flight when disturbed. Money she grasped completely. In addition she had hearing as sharp and powerful as the blind.

The afternoon sizzled. She sat in the gazebo eating a light lunch. Green salad, ice water. Thirty yards away, a group of women lolled in the shade of the porch drinking rum punch. Two were actresses, one of whom had auditioned for
Anna Lucasta;
two were singers; the other one studied with Katherine Dunham. Their conversation wasn’t loud, but Heed caught every word of it.

How could he marry her? Protection. From what? Other women. I don’t think so. Does he play around? Probably. Are you crazy, sure he does. She’s not bad-looking. Good figure. Way past good; she could be in the Cotton Club. Except for her color. And she’d have to smile some of the time. Needs to do something with her hair. Tell me about it. So, why, why’d he pick her? Beats me. She’s hard to be around. Hard how? I don’t know; she’s sort of physical. (Long laughter.) Meaning? You know, jungle-y. (Choking laughter.)

While they talked, four rivulets coursed down the side of Heed’s glass, breaking paths through moisture. Pimento eyes bulged in their olive sockets. Lying on a ring of onion, a tomato slice exposed its seedy smile, one she remembers to this moment.

Papa insisted she learn how to run the hotel and she did learn, despite local sniggering and May and Christine’s sabotage. They smoldered in an outrage kept lit by the radiance the couple brought with them to breakfast and their anticipatory glow at supper. Thoughts of Papa and her together in bed drove the two of them to more and newer meanness. The war had already been declared on the wedding gown Papa had ordered from Texas. Expensive, beautiful, it was way too big. L pinned it for alteration, but the gown could not be found until the afternoon of the ceremony, when it was too late. L folded the cuffs, safety-pinned the hem, still it took a lot for Heed to grin her way down the stairs into the hotel lobby and through the ceremony. A ceremony unobserved by Heed’s own family because, other than Solitude and Righteous Morning, none of her family was allowed to attend. The given excuse was that they were still mourning the deaths of Joy and Welcome. The real reason was May, who took pains to snub the whole Johnson brood. She even objected to Papa’s paying for the funerals—muttering that the boys had no business swimming in “their” part of the ocean. Only Heed’s younger sisters were permitted to squeeze into the room and listen to “Oh Promise Me.” From that spitefulness May and her daughter moved on to relentless criticism of the young bride: her speech, hygiene, table manners, and thousands of things Heed didn’t know. What “endorse a check” meant; how to dress a bed; how to dispose of sanitary napkins; how to set a table; how to estimate supplies. She could have learned to read script if that deficiency had not been a running joke. L, who liked her in those days, taught her a lot and saved the life Papa had given her and her alone. She could never have navigated those treacherous waters if L hadn’t been the current. Heed had not thought much about it at the time, but she took it for granted that her husband would be generous with her. He had already paid for her brothers’ funerals; gave her mother a present and put a grateful smile on her father’s face. She had no idea that so many other people—especially her own family—waited to take advantage of him. Her kinfolk so overreached, they forced the break that was never repaired. As soon as the wedding was over, they crept up on her. Hinting—“I heard they’re hiring but you need work shoes to get taken . . .” “Did you see that dress Lola gave her mama? . . .” Begging—“Ask him if he can lend me a little till . . .” “You know I’m short since . . .” “I’ll pay you all back as soon as . . .” Demanding—“Bring me some a that . . .” “Is this all?” “You don’t need that, do you?” By the time they were told to stay off hotel property, Heed was too ashamed to object. Even Righteous and Solitude began to wonder about her loyalty. Recriminations and accusations peppered her visits to Up Beach, and when she told Papa why her eyes were puffy, she was relieved by his firm response. All she needed was him, which was lucky because he was all she had.

Up to her neck in lilac bubbles, Heed rested her head on the tub’s curve of porcelain. Stretching, she manipulated the chain with her toe to pull out the stopper, then waited until the water drained. If she slipped and knocked herself out, at least she had a chance of coming to without drowning.

This is dumb as well as dangerous, she thought, climbing out of the tub. I can’t do it no more.

Wrapped in a towel, resting in Papa’s red barber’s chair, she decided to ask—no, order—Junior to help her right away in and out of the tub. It was a necessary sacrifice she did not look forward to. Dependency, awkwardness while exposing her poor soft nakedness to the judging glance of a firm young girl did not matter. What troubled Heed, had made her hesitate, was the loss of skin memory, the body’s recollection of pleasure. Of her wedding night, for instance, submerged in water in his arms. Creeping away from the uncomfortable reception, out the back door into the dark, rushing in tuxedo and way-too-big bridal gown across sea grass to powdery sand. Undressing. No penetration. No blood. No eeks of pain or discomfort. Just this man stroking, nursing, bathing her. She arched. He stood behind her, placed his hands behind her knees, and opened her legs to the surf. Skin might forget that in the company of a sassy girl whose flesh was accumulating its own sexual memories like tattoos. The latest of which, apparently, would be Romen’s mark. Where would it go? What would it look like? Junior probably had so many it would be hard to find space. They would merge finally into a lacy net covering her whole body, making indistinguishable one image from another; one boy from another.