The Orange Blossom Special (3 page)

On a Saturday afternoon, Dinah was downtown with her mother when they passed by the movie theater on Main Street. There was the boy with six fingers waiting in line with his parents. “I see someone from my homeroom,” whispered Dinah. “I'm going to say hi.” Delighted that her daughter had made a friend, Tessie watched as Dinah ran up to the boy.

“Hey,” she said, not looking him in the eye.

“Hey,” he answered in a low drawl.

“What movie are you seeing?”

“
Rock-a-bye Baby,
you know the one with Jerry Lewis,” he smiled.

“Well, enjoy the movie,” she said, running back to where her mom was waiting.

Tessie noticed both parents beaming at their boy who was so popular that a pretty redheaded girl came over to say hello to him.

Dinah could barely catch her breath as she said to her mother, “They're going to a Jerry Lewis movie, can you imagine? A Jerry Lewis movie.” She must have repeated that four times that day. That boy, those words, they stirred something inside of her.

That night, she took out her notebook and went through the numbers from the first day. Three: “Are you there?” (three words). Four: “I am here always” (four words). Five: “Are you talking to me?” Nine: “This is the only way that I can now.” For the first time since he died, Dinah felt her father's presence.

From then on, she would come to school each day filled with questions for her father. “Are you happy?” she'd send Eddie a three finger
sign. “I miss you and Mom,” he'd answer with five. She and Eddie became like silent lovers, so contained in themselves they never noticed that anyone else was watching. But Crystal Landy was watching. On a day in early March she caught up with Dinah as they were walking to algebra class.

“Hey,” she said, nudging Dinah's arm.

“Hey,” she said back, wondering why such a popular girl would even bother with her.

“So what's going on between you and Eddie Fingers?”

“Eddie who?”

“You know, the freaky guy in homeroom with the . . .” Crystal made her eyes go crossed and wagged her pinky in Dinah's face.

Dinah giggled. She'd never thought of him that way.

“What do you mean what's going on with us? I don't really know him.”

“Well I see all that crazy stuff you do with your hands. Everyone does. You in a secret club or something?” Crystal used her forefinger to move a piece of her sprayed hair off her face.

Dinah heard a tinge of want in her voice, and at that moment she realized that she had something that Crystal Landy couldn't have. Mostly she was aware of what Crystal had that she couldn't.

C
RYSTAL'S FATHER, MAYNARD LANDY,
owned a group of liquor stores, Landy's Liquors. It was where people went to shoot the breeze, plan the tailgate party, reclaim lost dogs and parrots. You can bet that Landy's Liquors figured one way or another into Saturday night for anyone who grew up in Gainesville. Maynard liked to boast that he was responsible for at least three weddings, and uncountable births. When his customers went on vacation, they would send Maynard picture postcards. He kept every one of them, from the Trevi Fountain to a milk truck in Wisconsin, taped over his cash
register. Among them was a framed letter from a University of Florida alumna.

“I won't go into the gorey details,” it read, “but let's just say that if it wasn't for your store I don't think that little Landy Williams would have entered this good earth on July 29, 1954.” Maynard would watch people read that letter, then laugh his nicotine laugh and start counting backward on his fingers to September. “It doesn't take a genius to figure out what this girl was doing during homecoming weekend, now does it?” He was a hard man to read, always friendly and laughing, but decidedly opaque when it came to his own feelings. When people like Anita Bryant or Rocky Graziano passed through town, Maynard and his wife, Victoria (“If you call me Vicky, I swear I'll scream”), would get their hooks into them and have them to a dinner party at their grand house in the Cypress Woods section of town. That's the kind of people they were.

Maynard Landy came by his money honestly. “The House That Landy's Built,” as he liked to call it, was one of the biggest in Gainesville. There was a kidney-shaped pool in the backyard and the only cabana in the neighborhood. By anyone's standards the place was deluxe. There was a sunken living room decorated in all white— “The Graziano Room,” they called it because they used it only when a famous person passed through. There was a soda fountain in the real living room, and a built-in television set that swiveled into the adjacent den. The bath in Victoria and Maynard's bedroom had a glass wall that looked onto a palm tree and a hibiscus bush growing outside their window. “It's like bathing in Bali Hai,” Victoria Landy would say, repeating the decorator's intention.

The older of the two Landy children, Charlie, lived in an all-blue bedroom with a painted blue wooden desk, a blue toy box, and three pennants on the wall—one from the newly minted Los Angeles Dodgers, another from the University of Michigan, and a third from
the New York Giants football team. This wasn't because Charlie rooted for teams that were from three completely different parts of the country, but because all the pennants were blue, another of the decorator's inspired details. Crystal's room was painted in what the decorator called “Crystal Pink.” There was a pink telephone, a pink shag rug, a pink stereo. Even the hangers in her closet were pink. Maynard would tease Crystal: “If you ever get a sunburn, we'll never find you in there.” Victoria saw the pink and blue motifs as strokes of genius. “He had all his creative juices flowing,” she would say of the decorator when showing off her children's rooms to guests.

Maynard never forgot that he was short and thickset with droopy turtle-like eyes, and that the redhead on his arm was as statuesque as Gina Lollabrigida. Even after two children, Victoria was still the most beautiful woman he had ever met. “Maynard is the brains of our family,” she would say with a half smile. “All I have to do is keep up my appearance.” She said it because it seemed to explain everything, and because Maynard liked hearing it. Maybe she even believed it herself.

Every Saturday morning, Victoria had her hair done at the fanciest beauty parlor in town, J. Baldy's. And once a week, she had a massage therapist come to the house. “Suppleness is the most important thing,” she would instruct Crystal, with the assumption that her daughter had the same grooming ambitions as she did.

Maynard came from a poor family. The men on his father's side helped to build the Seaboard Airline, the railroad line that connected the southeast to the northeast along the Atlantic coast. His father, Matthew Landy, would tell stories about how they had to dig up the trenches and use landfill to hold back the ocean water. The first passenger train that came down those tracks from New York to Miami was called the Orange Blossom Special, and Maynard and Charlie shared a fascination with it. They saved matchbooks and key rings
from it, and built a model of the orange, green, and gold locomotive that sat like a trophy on a special table in the living room.

Like most American towns in the early part of the century, Gainesville was built around its courthouse and transportation hubs. The downtown was a grid of commercial and government buildings, most of them redbrick with tin roofs, and everywhere the lanky Laurel oak trees. Gainesville had long been serviced by railroads that carried away lumber and phosphate and replaced the citrus and cotton crops that still hadn't recovered from the record-setting freezes of the 1890s. When word came that the town would be a stop along the route, the dream was that some of the rich folk traveling south would stop off and leave some of their money behind. Matthew shared that dream. When he rode the heaving work trains up and down the budding mainline, he would imagine the office buildings and hotels and banks and saloons that would inevitably grow up around the new station. He squirreled away a piece of his wages, and in 1927 he bought a little corner lot some five blocks from where the new station was to be built. Then came Black Friday and the Depression, and while work on the tracks went on, building in the rest of Gainesville, as in the rest of the country, screeched to a halt.

But the Orange Blossom Special turned out to be its own little works project. Matthew took out a loan from one of Roosevelt's new programs and built a liquor store on that corner lot. He called it the Rest Stop, figuring travelers stopping over would need a little something to wash away the fatigue from a twenty-hour train ride. That's not what happened. Instead, the store became the crossroads for those working at the budding businesses that sprang up around the station.

When Matthew died of a heart ailment at age fifty-two, he left the store to Maynard who changed the name to Landy's Liquors. Later, when he acquired three other liquor stores in nearby towns, he gave
them his name as well. “Hell,” he said, “it's like getting married, I might as well.”

Crystal learned early in life about expensive jewelry. Her mother would stare tenderly at the five-carat diamond Maynard had given her and say, “Now that's class.” About moisturizer, she cautioned, “Hands tell more than half the story.” And she was forever telling Crystal horror stories about sudden weight gain and pot-bellied “tummies.”

Slightly overweight, with a snaggle-tooth and crooked smile, Crystal would never be the beauty her mother was; she knew that. It left a space in who she was that she filled by being the class cut-up, the one who always sassed the teacher and made people laugh with her smart mouth.

W
EDNESDAY NIGHT DINNER
at the Landy's was always fried chicken, canned green beans, and potatoes. It was Crystal's favorite meal. The housekeeper, Ella, spooned a mound of the thick and buttery mashed potatoes onto her plate. Victoria narrowed her eyes and watched as Crystal reached for a warm Pillsbury dinner roll.

Charlie caught the edge of his mother's glance and tried to divert the conversation. “Auburn's playing Alabama this weekend,” he started. Ella stood behind Victoria's chair, waiting to serve her. “Just a ti-eensy bit please,” she said to Ella. “I'm watching my figure.” She pronounced “figure” like “vigor.” Nobody spoke. Victoria stepped into the silence and reported what the landscaper had suggested that day. “Eric says Saw Palmetto and Bear Grass over by the cabana would look lovely, because they're—you know—indigenous, they give it a very natural look.” As she waved her hand to show where in the backyard the new plantings would go, she observed with pleasure her Strawberry Crème nails, sharp as stilettos. “Crystal
honey, it's not too soon for you to start thinking about weekly manicures,” she said. “You can't go around with peasant hands for the rest of your life. And sweet thing, don't you think one roll is plenty?”

Charlie raised his eyebrows. It always struck him funny how his mother's conversation traveled like a switchback. He also wondered if she would ever get over the fact that Crystal was thick-boned and hadn't inherited her tiny waist. Charlie worried about things like that, even though Crystal couldn't care less.

At seventeen, he was short and thickset and weighed down with an unyielding sense of what was just and what wasn't. He thought that because he was a boy, or because of his likeness to his father, that his mother rarely directed her critical comments toward him. In truth, Victoria always felt Charlie saw through her. He would look at her funny when she talked about the landscaper or used fancy words like
indigenous,
as if he knew she was pretending to be somebody she wasn't. Unlike her, he was not comfortable with the visible wealth of his family. Even as a child, he rarely invited other kids over. He was the one who demanded that Ella join them at the dinner table and that she share their Easter and Christmas. When he was seven, the family went on a picnic to the Ichetucknee River. As they sat eating their egg and cheese sandwiches, two black children circled their blanket, screaming and laughing as the big one chased the little one. Victoria became uneasy and whispered to Maynard, “You'd think they'd have their own place to go.” Charlie had looked at her as though she had just given him a scolding. “Mama,” he said, “God just wants them to have a good time. He doesn't care where they do it.”

The remark became part of family lore, and left Victoria feeling that Charlie was special in a way that the rest of them weren't. Normally she didn't give things like that much thought, but just in case this was so, she treated him with consideration. Crystal was different:
life rolled off her like sweat. Victoria didn't have to watch herself around her.

“Mmm, love these rolls,” said Crystal in a taunting voice, reaching for another. “So listen to this. There's this sort of new girl in my class. And, well, there's this guy we call Eddie Fingers. They've got some secret code going on between them. They do this signaling thing with their hands, shooting numbers back and forth, like they know what they're talking about. It drives me crazy.”

For the first time since they sat down, Maynard seemed interested. “Who's Eddie Fingers?” he asked.

“Oh, you know.” Crystal sounded impatient. “This kid in my class who has an extra finger on his left hand.”

“Is that why you call him Eddie Fingers?”

“No, Dad. We call him Eddie Fingers because his hair's so short. Of course that's why we call him Eddie Fingers!”

“What does the extra finger look like?” Maynard asked.

“It kind of looks like a baby's pinky, real skinny, with an eensy weensy fingernail.”

“Crystal, that is disgusting.” Victoria put her fork down. “Why on earth would you concern yourself with a boy and his deformity, and some pathetic new girl starved for friendship? Could we please talk about something a little less gruesome? When do the cheerleading tryouts begin?”