Loving Women (25 page)

She was due to finish work at six and ten minutes before the hour I got up and crossed Garden Street and walked slowly down the street toward Sears. I stopped at the alley and felt a sudden attack of hopelessness. Her bicycle wasn’t there. And if her bicycle wasn’t there, she probably wasn’t there either. I dawdled past the store and glanced through the windows, as casually as possible. I didn’t see her inside.
Maybe she’s gone
, I thought, feeling lost and alone in a town that wasn’t mine. Maybe she’d realized it was ridiculous to be seeing a kid like me on a Saturday night in a town full of men. Men with money. Fliers.
Officers
. Men who’d been around the world and back, flown combat missions, faced death. Men like Mercado. Down the street I saw the neon blinking on outside Trader Jon’s, but in my mind, I imagined her waking up on Saturday morning, thinking, “Oh, that damned kid,” and lying there deciding to call in sick so she wouldn’t have to see me. Maybe there was a guy lying in bed beside her. Smoking a cigarette, while she phoned in her lie. Speaking to her in Spanish later. She touched his face and smiled, saying, “I can’t go to town today.” Then lighting a cigarette. Then adding, “I have to stay here.” And the man did not protest because the man, of course, did not want to leave her. He reached out, touched her nipples, whispered her name.

I stopped at the corner just past Sears, and leaned on a lamppost, looking up and down the street. I hoped none of the gang would see me. I didn’t want them asking me what I was doing standing
on an empty street in Pensacola. They’d think I was a degenerate or something. Or they’d drag me down the street to Trader Jon’s, or out to the Dirt Bar. And I didn’t want to go to either place; this little hour belonged to me. Most of all, I couldn’t tell them the truth. “I’m waiting for a woman named Eden Santana.” I couldn’t say that, admitting with my tone that I cared for the woman and was disappointed in her absence. We were sailors.
Ah remember the days
(the Old Salt said)
when men were men and women were carpets and all the ships was wood
. Anchors Aweigh, my boys. Bell-bottom trousers, suit of Navy blue, I love a sailor boy and— No. I couldn’t say anything to them.

The clock on the Blount Building said it was ten after six. And I thought:
I’ll wait five more minutes. If she’s not here in five minutes, then she’s not coming
. Maybe the whole thing was stupid. She was telling me something. I should take the hint. Just get out of here. Hell, I’m freshly shaved and smell good and have money in my pocket. I don’t have to wait here like a goddamned fool.

A car horn honked. Once. Then again.

I looked across the street at the sound. Eden Santana was behind the wheel of an old dark-green car, smiling at me and waving. I felt like doing cartwheels, shouting, punching street signs. I went around to the passenger side and she leaned across and opened the door.

“Get in,” she said. “You want to drive?”

“No, no,” I said. Closing the door, trying not to slam it, to show I was anxious. “You drive.”

She started driving again, making a left into a side street.

“I’m sorry I’m so damned late,” she said. “Every girl in that place had a damned date tonight and the ladies’ room looked like a football stadium. Then I had to go get the car, out in the back, and all the streets go the wrong way, and … How are you, child?”

“Great,” I said. “Just great.”

I could smell her now, all flowers, fields in the spring. She had done something to her hair; it was a controlled pile of a million curls. She was wearing a lavender dress and stockings with a seam down the back and high-heeled white shoes, which I watched as she shifted gears and pushed the car down dark streets.

“So, what d’you think?” she said.

“You look amazing,” I said. “I love the dress. And your hair. And—”

“Not me! The
car
!”

“It’s—”

“Cost me seventy-five bucks, up at Bargainville on West Cervantes. A 1940 Ford. Runs pretty good for a thirteen-year-old, don’t you think?”

“It sounds good,” I said (thinking:
When this car was new, I was four and she was nineteen
). And then glanced at her, as she turned the wheel, straightened out, went down another street. “But you know something? I gotta tell you the truth.”

“You hate Fords.”

“Worse. I don’t know how to drive Fords or anything else.”

“Say what?”

“I can’t drive a car.”

“Well, I’ll be damned.”

I explained why, and she listened and nodded and then reached for her purse and her Luckies.

“Anyway,” I said, “I feel dumb about it.”

“Don’t feel dumb,” she said. “You got good reasons. Up in the country, folks all learn to drive young ’cause it’s so far from one place to another. Still see people walkin’ everyplace they need to go, and once in a while you see an old cart, like in the old days, a cart with a horse. Now they mostly got them cars. Have to. But you didn’t need to do that. So don’t feel dumb.”

She was talking very quickly, and it never occurred to me that night that she was throwing the words at me because she was nervous, too. I couldn’t imagine Eden Santana being nervous. Not over me. She put a cigarette in her mouth, but couldn’t strike a match without taking her hands off the wheel. I took the matches and tried to do it for her. The breeze blew out two matches and then she handed me the cigarette.

“Light it up for me, will you, Michael?”

The smoke tasted sour as I inhaled and handed the cigarette back to her.

“And hey, what the hell,” she said, pausing to take a deep drag. “I can teach you how to drive. I used to—I’m a pretty fair driver, and I could teach you.”

“I’d love that.”

Thinking:
I’ll be sure then to see you again. During the week and on weekends, too, maybe. You’ll explain gears and shifts, gas pedal and accelerator. You’ll place my hands on the wheel. I’ll smell your hair, hear you laugh. This night is not the end. We begin
. There was water on my
right, all the way to the horizon, and lights on small boats and a lighthouse away off. The sea was black.

“Where we going?” I said.

“The beach,” she said. “Out the causeway to Santa Rosa Island. There’s a little shrimp place there I found the other day. Just shrimp and beer. Nothin’ else. And cheap too. All you can eat for a dollar.”

“You’re kidding?”

“You better like shrimp.”

“All I can eat.”

Then we were on the causeway, a long, narrow two-lane bridge out over the water. The breeze was cooler off the sea and I looked at Eden Santana, her brow furrowed slightly in concentration, her hair blowing, the lavender dress lifting and settling on her tan legs. And thought:
My life right now, at this moment, with this woman beside me and the breeze blowing, riding over the sea, is truly beautiful
. And I was right.

We ate great mounds of boiled shrimp: dozens hundreds millions of them, sitting at a metal table beside screened windows overlooking the dark beach. We filled a bowl with the shells and drank Jax beer while I looked at her and she asked questions and I tried to answer. The lipstick came off her mouth. The sea air made her hair frizzier than ever. People came in and sat down and ate and left and we were still there. I drew pictures on napkins, and signed and dated them and wrote “Pop’s Shrimp Place” beneath the dates: pictures of a chief gunnery officer in uniform and a fat lady with a thin bearded man and a grizzled guy who looked like a fisherman. Then we ordered more shrimp and went on eating. When we were finished, Eden leaned back, a grin on her face, and rubbed her stomach.

“Gotta walk some of this off, child,” she said.

I stood up, smothered a belch, and left a dollar tip, wondering if that was too much, and she would think I was showing off. But she took my hand and led the way out through the door to the beach. She took her shoes off and held them in one hand. Then she took my hand, lacing her fingers between mine, and we started to walk. The sand was very white, and the surf a long way off. Eden gazed up at the bunched thick stars. We left the lights of the shrimp place behind and soon were alone in a great emptiness.

Then she saw a piece of driftwood, huge as a tree but bone white, and we sat on its trunk while she smoked a cigarette.

“You said you had a husband,” I said, then wished I hadn’t.

“Yes,” she said, without turning to me.

“What happened to him?”

“He’s home.”

“But you’re not,” I said, trying to be light.

She turned to me. “No, I’m not. I’m here, child. With you. Or didn’t you notice?”

“I don’t mean to pry.”

“Then don’t.”

“It’s just … well, you said to me the other night that I didn’t know you. And that was true. That
is
true.”

“The details, they don’t matter, do they? This is me. Right here, sitting on this piece of driftwood. Nothing else
to
me. Just what’s here.”

“I’ve told you all about me,” I said.

“Maybe there’s less to tell,” she said curtly.

I was quiet then. She was right: I had less to tell. For a simple reason: I was a kid and she wasn’t. When I was two years old, she was sixteen. She was ready to fuck guys when I was learning to walk. She might even have been married then. At sixteen. Just a year younger than I was when I went in the Navy. They married younger than that down south. Yeah, she had a lot more to tell.

She squeezed my hand.

“Did I hurt your feelings, child?” she said softly.

“No, no—”

“I did, didn’t I? Well, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. I hope you know that. Just, I got me some bad habits. Someone says somethin’ hard to me, I want to answer back. I wasn’t always like that. I was a nice quiet little girl for a long long time. But then it got so I had to answer back.”

“To him? The husband?”

She smiled in a knowing way. “Maybe someday I’ll tell you all about that. Not tonight. Not now. It’s just too damned beautiful out here for that.”

She stood up and looked at the moon and the stars, and then said, “Don’t look now. Don’t watch me.”

I stared at the sea and heard her moving behind me. And then she came up beside me and handed me her stockings.

“Couldn’t stand them one more minute,” she said.

The stockings were silky and feminine in my hands and I rubbed them slightly as we walked, thinking that they’d been where I’d never been. For a second, I wanted to put them in my mouth. And then rolled them and slipped them in my pocket.

“Look, you can see the sea oats, up on the dune. See? The dark stuff? That’s what holds the dune together. They got deep wide roots, and they move under the sand, like steel in concrete, you know?” She led me over to look at the dark clusters in the light of the moon. “You ever see anyone pullin’ them up, you give ’em a good quick hop in the butt, hear? Lose them sea oats, you lose the whole damned beach.”

“I’ve never seen them before.”

“You have a beach in New York, don’t you?”

“Yeah, a bunch of them. Coney Island and Rockaway and Jones Beach, a bunch of others.”

“Well, if they don’t have sea oats, you’re gonna lose them.”

We climbed the dune. The island was all dark, the nearest lights a mere glow across the bay in the town, and the wind was rising and she looked up at the stars.

“There’s something I’m gonna do. Something I wanted to do all my life,” she said out loud, as much to the night or the wind as to me. “Gonna do it.”

She turned her back and reached up under the dress and peeled off her panties. She looked at me as she stepped out of them, then smiled faintly, and handed them to me.

“I want to feel the wind,” she whispered.

And faced the sea, lifting her dress, her legs spread and planted to the ankles in the sand. She threw her head back and closed her eyes and shivered. The wind moved between her thighs and I could see her dark roundness and then she shivered again. And then again. The wind was sighing and a buoy was
ting-tinging
away off and a moaning sound rose from her throat.

I held her panties to my face. They smelled of salt and the dark sea.

Chapter

28

S
he drove me back to Ellyson Field.

“I’d rather go home with you,” I said.

“No,” she said. “I don’t want to fool you.”

“I don’t think you’d do that.”

“I might.”

“Just tell me the truth,” I said. “Even if it hurts.”

“That’s a deal. If I can’t tell you the truth, I won’t say anything at all.”

“Deal.”

We moved past bars and car lots and churches. I felt the lump of her rolled stockings in my pocket and slipped them out and laid them on the seat.

“You get awful quiet sometimes, child.”

“Maybe I can’t tell
you
the truth either.”

“You better not bottle too much up. Lots of people do that, and it drives em crazy …”

The lazy drawl rose at the end, as if she had more to say. But she just shook her head in a rueful way. She was driving slowly now behind a fat squat truck. She looked out at the side, trying to see ahead, started to move once, suddenly darted back in lane as a car roared by in a blaze of light. “Gah-
damn
.” Then she looked again and gave it the gas, biting her lower lip, and roared past the truck, honking her horn, half in anger, the rest a tease. Then another car was in front of us, lights very bright. She whipped into the right-hand lane, missing the other car by a foot. She laughed like a teenager and shook her head and then slowed again. I was beginning
to love the way she did things: she was confident, sure, enjoying risk and escape. Who was she anyway? I turned to her.