The Orange Blossom Special (16 page)

“Mother of God, that is a sentimental piece of crap,” she said, when she opened her eyes again. Her words were woozy and unconvincing, and he knew then that the fire had gone out of her.

T
HE MUSIC BROUGHT
Tessie to the time when Dinah was sixteen months and just starting to walk. They were in downtown Carbondale and Tessie had her by the hand when somehow Dinah slipped away and started to toddle into the street toward an oncoming car. Tessie swooped down to pick her up and fell on her knees. As she went down, she held Dinah up, like a trophy, and, miraculously, she was unhurt. But both of Tessie's knees were raw and bloody. That night, when Jerry came home, he looked at the Mer-curochrome and Band-Aids and said, “Holy cow, Jo, what did you do, crawl all the way to the supermarket?” She'd considered making up a story about tripping down the basement stairs, but thought if she told this lie, there would be nothing to prevent it from becoming the tail of a kite of lies to follow. So she told him the truth. She remembered the way he tilted his head when he listened hard, and how, when she cried and said, “What kind of a mother am I, to let my child wander into the street like that?” he'd taken her into his arms and said, “You're the kind of a mother who has a willful child and does the best she can.”

L
OST IN THEIR THOUGHTS
, Tessie and Barone sat at the table long after Sarah Vaughan finished singing, and the Beef Stroganoff gravy had congealed into a viscous puddle around the
edges of their plates. How sad he looked when his face was in repose. She had never seen his energy depleted.

“I ran over a cat and killed it,” she said, breaking their silence.

“You what?”

“A few months ago, after we first moved here, I was picking up Dinah from the Landys' and on the way home, I hit a cat. Dinah told me I'd killed it, but I told her no I didn't, that she was being ridiculous. But I did. I killed it.”

Barone could have said, “Why are you telling me this?” or “That's a terrible thing, to run over a cat and kill it,” and though neither of them might ever know why, that would have been the end of that.

Instead, he put his elbow on the table and cupped his chin in his hand. “I'm sorry. You must have been terrified.” He could picture it, the wild scared look in her eyes. Dinah's voice high and whiny. Tessie's impulse not to admit to herself, much less to her daughter, what had actually happened.

“You bet I was,” she said. “You know, you're new to town, and everything is strange and you want to do things right. And then you do the most wrong thing you can possibly do, in front of your own daughter no less, and it leaves you feeling . . . I don't know . . . hopeless I guess.” She twisted her mouth and looked off to the side.

“There's no percentage in hopelessness,” he said. “You lose hope and what've you got? I mean as human beings, Dottie, it's the only thing we have that makes us different from animals. Well, we have thumbs, I suppose, but think about it: you moved from Carbondale with a young girl because somewhere inside you thought things could be better. And you came here and you got a job and your daughter is happier and you've met me and tonight we ate Beef Stroganoff. Could you ever have imagined any of this would happen? If you only accept life's bad surprises, and don't believe that
there are good ones of equal weight waiting to happen, well, then I don't really see what the point of going on is. Do you?”

“Some people have no choice but to go on,” she said. “If they go on and get the rest of what you said, then that's gravy.”

As the words came out of her mouth, they both looked down at the table.

“No,
that's
gravy,” laughed Barone, pointing at the gelatinous mess on his plate.

“Could I hear that song again, the one about polka dots and pug noses?” asked Tessie.

Back came Sarah Vaughan, her rich throaty voice singing all about the country dance in a garden. They got up to dance and just as he had planned it, Tessie leaned into him when she heard the words,
polka dots and moonbeams.
When they walked, their arms around each other, into her bedroom they did not act like two grasping teenagers in the backseat of a Chevy. This time they were tender and slow, two grateful grownups turning to each other for comfort and a respite from pain.

Ella and Charlie hadn't talked since the day of Eddie Fingers's funeral. They weren't avoiding each other exactly, it's just that they knew when they finally did get together it would be to bring up things neither was ready to discuss.

For her part, Ella unburdened herself to God. “Please help me understand what I seen with my own eyes,” she prayed. She went to church every morning and tried to make sense of her troubled thoughts. Her oldest friend, Pauline Brown, had been going to the Old Stone Baptist Church with her for nearly twenty years. Since they worked for families only six blocks apart, often they walked back and forth together. On one of those cloudless mornings, when the sun breathed fire and they huddled under the shade of Pauline's faded red umbrella, Pauline said to her old friend, “What's wrong with you? You're not yourself lately.”

Ella, whose voice always soared like a creaky old bird when they sang the hymns, had lately been singing flat, with none of her usual exuberance. Pauline had noticed that, and how she didn't stick around after services and chat with the other parishioners. So Ella told her old friend about what had happened that Saturday at the funeral, and then later, at the pool with Mrs. Landy and that young girl in the T-shirt.

“Do you think Mrs. Landy is one of those women who likes other women?” Ella said.

“What of it?” asked Pauline. “They said the same thing about Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, and she was the best friend colored folks ever had. They said she looked like a man, and dressed like one too.”

Ella was not one to judge other people by their looks, she with a nose so flat that it looked as if it were always pressed against a win-dowpane, and the double chin that wrapped around her other one like a crinoline. The two women fell into thought as they moved closer together under the umbrella.

“What if it's true that Mrs. Landy turns out to be like that? What will become of Mr. Landy, the Landy children, the house, my room?”

“Ella,” said Pauline, “your imagination will drive you to distraction. You keep your nose out of what's not yours to know. Whatever is meant to be, will be.”

She knew Pauline was right, but she couldn't stop herself from thinking about all that had happened on that day: Mrs. Lockhart and that man—that nice-looking older man. She saw how Mrs. Lockhart's nostrils would flair every time he looked at her. Sure as sugar, there was something between them. And what about the girl, Dinah Lockhart, seeing her dead friend laid out in his coffin. She nearly up and died with him. Poor child, her father being dead and all.

Like a swarm of bees, the thoughts kept coming, until Ella felt they would bury her alive. She might have stayed locked inside herself had she not received a letter from her brother Reggie two days later. In the last few years, she and Reggie had lost touch. She knew he was a porter on the Orange Blossom Special, and that he had a wife, Portia, in Hendersonville up in North Carolina. She held the letter in her hand, staring at his jagged handwriting. “He writes like a pecking chicken,” Olie used to say. Reggie only wrote when the news was bad or he wanted something. The last time she heard from him was
when he needed money for a new orthopedic shoe. “Now what?” she wondered, slowly pulling the flap from where it was glued to the envelope. She noticed that his handwriting looked shakier than usual. The letter was dated May 28, 1959.

My dear sister Ella,

The past years have not been good to me. For reasons that I cannot explain here I lost my position at the railroad. Portia and I scraped by on barely nothing and now she don't want me in the house no more. You are all I can turn to and I don't want to be a burden but I would like to come and stay with you in Florida. I will be arriving in Tallahassee on Saturday June 19.

Your loving brother Reggie.

As if she didn't have enough on her mind.

The Landys knew about Reggie and spoke kindly about him, the way you would about any infirm person. But frankly, Ella couldn't imagine how Reggie, with his missing teeth and dragging his too-short leg behind him as though he were tethered to a ball and chain, and Mrs. Landy, who was repulsed by anything that wasn't physically attractive, could exist under one roof.

Later that afternoon, she caught sight of Charlie as he was pumping soda from the fountain off the living room. “How you been?” she asked, squinting at one of the glasses on the shelf to see if it needed washing.

“If it seems like I've been avoiding you, I'm sorry,” said Charlie. “Between everything that's going on . . .” Charlie didn't finish his sentence. For the past week, he'd been having visions of Ella trying to hide some kind of trouble. It was something she wouldn't be able to conceal much longer. She wasn't pregnant, it wasn't that kind of trouble, but it was something that disturbed her deeply. And there
was the fire. Always the fire. “Can we talk up in your room?” he asked.

“You say when,” she answered.

“After dinner,” he said. “While my mom and dad are watching the news and Crystal's on the phone.”

Later that night, as planned, Charlie found himself sitting on Ella's bed as always. He took off his shoes and pulled his knees underneath his chin. He stared across at her bookshelves filled with
Kids Say the Darndest Things, Peyton Place,
weathered romance novels, and small religious paperbacks.

“This is a good woman. Why would anyone throw stones at her?” The thought came and went like a draft.

Ella noticed Charlie scanning her books and pointed to them with the back of her hand. “Who needs all of them when we got more drama going on here than we know what to do with?”

“You can say that again,” laughed Charlie.

“I've been at church every day since then,” said Ella. “This is what I know. God gives us as much as we can handle and not one bit more. It may not seem so when it happens, but I've seen it time and again with my own eyes.”

Charlie said what had been on his mind for the last week. “Ella, I'm sorry that woman spoke to you that way at the funeral. She had no right to say you couldn't be there.”

For a moment Ella looked as if she didn't know what he was talking about. Then she remembered. “Oh that,” she said. “That's the way things are. That woman was a silly old fool. Don't go letting her upset you.”

All her life Ella had sat where she was supposed to, drunk from the drinking fountains assigned to her. It never crossed her mind not to. She had her place at the Landys' and that was that.

“It doesn't have to be like that,” said Charlie. He didn't know how it would change, only that it would.

Charlie and Ella let the silence that followed sit between them like a prayer. After some moments, Ella was the first to speak. “For all that's happening I got even more news today.” She told him about Reggie and the letter. “I think Mr. Landy will be okay with it, but Mrs. Landy? Well, you know.”

Deep inside, Charlie knew Ella was right, but there was no point adding to her worries. “My mother isn't always the most hospitable person to strangers, but my daddy will do the right thing.”

Charlie wasn't used to saying half-truths to Ella or keeping secrets from her. But he'd also never had the kinds of thoughts that had been filling his head ever since what happened with Dinah at that funeral last week. How could he describe to Ella how heavy the girl's body felt when he first gripped her arm, how he knew that her dead father needed some peace and quiet, and how, when he told her that, he could feel her body fill with life. It made him feel a kind of tenderness that he had never felt before. How could he tell anyone these thoughts—even Ella?

What he felt about the girl was what he felt about what was happening around him in general. Her world was as fragile as a hawk's egg just before it cracks open. When that happens, the bird becomes so big and rapacious so quickly, it is hard to imagine that it was ever contained within anything at all.

When Ella asked Charlie to pray with her, he fell on his knees next to her as he had since he was a little boy. Now he was seventeen, a young man filled with new thoughts and looming premonitions. He needed all the help he could get.

I wonder if she's gotten herself knocked up?”

Glenn Sr. lit his pipe and sucked in the thought.

“Oh shit. Maybe she needs the money for one of those abortion doctors.”

“Goddam,” said Junior.

“Goddam is right,” said Senior.

Earlier that day Tessie had asked to speak to them in Glenn Sr.'s office. The men stood while Tessie sat in a gray metal chair, staring up at them suppliantly.

“I wouldn't ask this if it weren't absolutely necessary, and I promise I will never ask again. But I wonder if I could borrow two hundred and fifty dollars.” She didn't wait for an answer, just continued with her planned speech.

“I know it's a lot of money, but if you agreed, we could take five dollars out of my pay every week for the next year. I'd be so grateful.”

Glenn Sr. nodded at Glenn Jr., and then Glenn Sr. shook her hand and said, “Of course we can do that, Tess.”

“We're glad to help you out, Tess,” said Junior, giving her a warm smile that lifted her above her humiliation.

“Hot damn,” said Senior.

After Dinah left for Osceola, it got so quiet at night sometimes, Tessie imagined that she was hearing the distant roar of the ocean, or maybe it was the rhythm and flow of her own body. Her letters to Jerry became more urgent and less questioning.

Dinah's gone off to camp. I borrowed $250 from the Bechs. I know they wanted to know why I needed the money but they were too decent to ask. I used to think that for all the bad things that happened good things would happen to make up for them. I don't think that anymore.