Daddy Warbucks’ Tow-Head Chile

 

 

 

 

You can fall in love with a rich boy as easy as a poor one. That’s what Mother always said. Even so, she married a poor city boy and began a life of hardworking, blue-collar poverty, ending up with a houseful of kids. She shared plenty of motherisms she thought I needed to hear growing up: “Boys don’t like girls who act smarter than them” and “Become a nurse—this country needs more nurses.” She was no nurse. Never missed a chance to outwit my dad. Since she hadn’t followed her own advice about anything, I didn’t feel inclined to either. I’d soon learn that preconceptions, hers and mine, about boys, rich and poor, were as useful as cockle in your pole corn.

            According to her, I gave my heart to too many boys too fast. I did love at least a half dozen boys during my teenage years. Lying in bed at night with the covers yanked over my head, I’d imagine their faces—all those smooth cheeks and crooked smiles, some with dimples, some as pretty as girls. Never gave a second thought as to whether they came from families with money or were “poor sorts”—Mother’s not-so-nice name for them.

 If they were poor sorts, what were we? We bought all our furniture at auction. We ate whatever my dad picked off the farm with his shotgun, groundhog and pigeon sometimes. Every one of us wore hand-me-downs. Our ramshackle old farmhouse burned through too much heating oil during long Pennsylvania winters and sat on too much property to keep tidy during the summer. Still, nobody starved, went naked, or lacked for warmth.

 Mother hated our hard-scrabble farm life. Hardly anything pleased her. Throughout my high school years, she seemed angry and unhappy, which I never understood until much later in life when I went through the change myself.

            By my senior year, I’d had enough of her carping about the front porch needing repair and the lawn looking like an African jungle. About rich and poor boys and what I planned do with my life.

“Just so you know,” I told her the week I got my commencement robe, “I do have a plan.”

“No volunteering at Chestnut Valley this summer, Ginna. You need money for school,” she said, pointing to the kitchen chair. “Now, hop up there so I can see if your gown needs hemming.”

I hadn’t planned on working at Chestnut Valley, so it wasn’t worth arguing the point. Someday, I’d set my mother straight that working there had been good for me. I grew early varieties of plants like strawflowers, hollyhocks, and flowering sweet pea from Colonial times that might have disappeared forever if the farm museum hadn’t preserved them.

 I hiked up my robe and climbed onto the kitchen chair, clutching the back to steady myself.

“Face me,” she barked, “so I can get a good look.”

Towering over Mother, I realized it was time to spring my plan on her. “I want to stay with Aunt Cille for the summer.”

 My father’s older sister, full name—Lucille, lived in a trailer park in the Carolina Piedmont on the outskirts of Raleigh. Her son Ben had married his high school sweetheart Sara and moved out over the winter. So I knew she had an extra bedroom in her double-wide if she hadn’t turned it into a sewing room already.

“You can’t go down there. Subject closed!” Mother said through several straight pins. She removed one and slipped it into the hem. “Don’t move.”

I didn’t bring up the Aunt Cille arrangement again until a week later, when we were picking early strawberries, which usually put Mother in a better mood. We were moving down the rows in a patch she planted herself. May had been rainy. Then we had a string of warm days and cool nights—perfect for growing fat, juicy berries.

“Mother, Aunt Cille wants me to move in with her.”

Her face flushed pink—a heat flash probably. “She doesn’t have the money to support you.”

            Five years ago, Aunt Cille had moved out of a single-family home into a trailer park when she gave up her job as a prison guard to be a receptionist with the Baptist State Convention. “Who knows what she’s doing, leaving a good job like that?” Mother had said. “I guess she’s depending on the Lord to supply her needs.”

             Since my fingers were occupied picking berries, I crossed my ankles for good luck. “I’ll use my graduation money for a bus ticket. I won’t be a drain on her.”

            “She didn’t bounce back the way the family expected after Uncle Edward cheated on her with a younger woman.” Mother wiped her forehead with the back of her hand. “She can be a pill, Ginna. Very set in her ways sometimes.”

Living with Mother for the last eighteen years was fine training for moving in with Aunt Cille. “I know she’s had hardships. I’ll get a job.”

“Ginna, you are so naïve about the ways of the world.”

Motherism number forty-two.

“If I don’t take chances, Mother, how am I going to learn anything?”

Mother snorted. “What are you going to do down there? Lay bricks? Be a surgeon?”

            This seemed unfair. I'd only had babysitting jobs in high school because she wanted me to take part in activities like yearbook and plays, which is how I’d met all those boys in the first place. Since her father had died young, her mother was forced to be a domestic, cleaning summer homes in the Catskills. Throughout high school Mother had to work for a chocolatier to help out, which actually sounded like fun, but it wasn’t my story to tell or my cross to bear. “I want you to have all the opportunities I never had,” she’d always insisted.

            As I inspected the bottom-most leaves for stragglers, I prepared what to say next. “Aunt Cille said there’s lots of jobs in the Raleigh paper each week.”

            She shrugged—she was weakening. “You’ll need a car to keep a job. Ever think of that?”

            “Ben’s loaning me his. Sara’s not working this summer because she’s due in September.” I gave the plant a once-over. Definitely time to move on. “He wants me to come down. He says it’d be good for Aunt Cille.”

            Mother wiped some dirt off the side of her nose. “Who’s going to do the mowing?”

            This would force my brothers—the Rip van Winkle twins—to help out more. “Boys can mow, too, Mother.”

            “I’m glad you have all this figured out,” she said, sounding anything but glad. “I know the kind of summer jobs they have down there. Pea picking. How are you going to meet any nice boys picking peas?”

I couldn’t tell whether she was mad that I’d made plans behind her back or sad because she’d miss me. “I’ll wait tables.” I popped two berries into my mouth at once. Boy, were they sweet. “How hard can it be?”

“Ginna, don’t talk with your mouth full! How many years have I told you that?”

Not enough, apparently. And I knew full well what she meant by nice boys. I just never understood why my mother assumed that rich boys were nice. Hugging that berry bucket to my chest, I swore then I’d never date a rich boy—not even if he was the nicest, best-looking one on the whole planet—just to spite her.

*

            “From Pennsyltucky, eh? That’s what we use to call it. When we were kids,” the manager of the Raleigh Waffle Shoppe said as he eyed my carefully-printed application. “You got experience?” He leaned on the counter and gave me a no-tooth smirk, awaiting my answer.

            “I waited tables at a diner back home.” The lie spooled like silk thread out of my mouth. It was really my friend Beth Ann who’d worked there. But I often stopped by after play rehearsals since the school bus dropped me off right in the parking lot. I’d watched her: all she had to do was write down orders, carry plates of food, and cut pie. I’d pretty much done all that at home. And acting had taught me how to make someone else’s story my own.

He narrowed his eyes. “If someone comes up to the counter and asks for pop,” he said, “what do you serve ’em?”

Today was my lucky day. Beth Ann’s family had moved to our town from Pittsburgh. “A soda pop,” I said, like I heard people using it every day. “A soft drink.”

The smirking manager chuckled then. He hired me on the spot.

*

On weekends, I made real money at the Waffle Shoppe. I even made a friend, a divorcée named Tampa who called herself a mountain girl and said, “May I hep ye” when she answered the phone. That summer I needed someone to talk to, if only a little. The dishwasher was an older man that we would've called slow back home when we were being kind. He never talked to me. The smirking manager had greasy black hair and horn-rimmed glasses he tried to slide back up his nose by snorting and tossing his head. He sometimes bussed tables when it got really busy but mostly stayed in the back reading who-knows-what magazines. But Tampa was easy to talk to—as friendly as a cat with itchy ears.

            She had coppery red-blonde hair, Titian #0437, which she pronounced Tahitian, until I told her they were two different words. When customers complimented her hair color, she told them she dyed it herself, “In the kitchen sink, sugar.” Even when she wasn’t working, she wore it swept off her face, all teased up and shellacked into a crisp helmet. When she had a fistful of tips in her apron, she’d do a little step dance in the back and call out, “I’m flush y’all!” because it made the dishwasher laugh. She had three kids from three different fathers. Just when I was going to ask how she got her name, I overheard her tell a customer, “My mama allus wanted to see them racin’ dogs down thar. Our dogs jes’ laid on the porch, day in, day out—no-account hounds. Never did get to see them dogs runnin’. Named me Tampa anyway.”

She smoked cigarette after cigarette on breaks, sometimes during her shift when the manager was doing office work. A lot of people in North Carolina smoked. I began to think it was the state pastime.

            “How come ye don’ smoke?” she asked me a few days after I started.

            It was a disgusting habit. “Never tried it,” I told her instead.

            “Lemme teach ye!” she offered. “Don’ wanna be a baby all yer life, now do ye?”

I passed on the smoking lessons. Instead I learned all about Hickory, North Carolina, where she grew up. It was halfway between Raleigh and Asheville and had a string of furniture stores where rich people from Asheville bought their dining room sets.

“Why’s it named Hickory?” I asked.

            “How in hell should I know?” she said. “After the hickory switch Mama buried in my white ass is why.”

            She was sassy with her male customers, too—the sassier she got, the bigger the tip. Once a trucker ordered strawberry pie for dessert. “Lordy! Look at the size of them strawberries,” he said when she slid the plate in front of him. “Where do you get ’em, girl?

 “Looka here, now,” she said, cocking one hip and sticking out her lower lip in a pout. “I just serve ’em. I don’ grow ’em.”

And he left her a ten-dollar tip!

Tampa and I might not have been friends back home. We might not have even liked each other. But in that Raleigh Waffle Shoppe during the summer of 1977, we were true pals.

*

After a month of waitressing, I’d saved one hundred and fifty dollars, enough to buy books for my first term at college. I hadn’t told Mother, but more and more thought I’d probably attend North Carolina State in the fall rather than come home. I could claim to be a resident by living with Aunt Cille and get in-state tuition.

One day, I drove myself around campus. It looked like a place I could be happy—tidy lawns and brick buildings, nice bushes and trees but no pretentious ivy-covered walls. Kind of plain Jane and kind of just right. They had a big horticulture program, and that’s what I wanted to study. I’d ask Aunt Cille about moving in with her for the duration of my college career that evening.

She’d arrived home before me—her car blocked the gravel driveway, and she had locked the front door. I let myself in with my key just in time to see her slam down the telephone receiver. “Ginna! Come here.”

Who’d she been talking to? Was it something I’d done? “Why was the door locked, Aunt Cille?”

She held out a prescription bottle. “What is that?” she whispered, as if we were under FBI surveillance.

I took the pill container and glanced at the label. It said tetracycline, prescribed for Ben. The little seeds inside didn’t look like any acne medication I’d ever seen.

“Are they—” She choked out her next words. “Mary-jew-wanna seeds?”

The less I said here, the better. “Maybe.”

Aunt Cille’s face turned a purplish-red. Then she punched out the screen from the kitchen window and hurled the seeds into the backyard.

An ex-prison guard should have known to flush them down the toilet. You didn’t have to be a horticulture major to realize that seeds needed two things to grow and one of them is dirt. I could see the headline in the News and Observer now: Baptist Nabbed For Backyard Pot Farm.

She’d have to buy a new window screen. She needed stitches in her hand. I guess you lose all perspective when it’s your son’s mary-jew-wanna seeds.

I decided to ask her about staying in North Carolina another time.

Meanwhile I set my sights on making more money at the diner. It was almost all I could think about. I worked extra shifts, filling in for Tampa when she had a family emergency, keeping so busy, I didn’t have time to spend any of it. I certainly didn’t have time to think about boys—rich, poor, short, tall, country boys, city boys—none of them. Until one Saturday evening in the middle of summer, when a certain stranger strolled into the Waffle Shoppe and slid into a booth in my section.

His face looked wind-burned, like he’d been out in a tempest all day. His sandy blond hair fell into his eyes like an unclipped sheepdog’s and curled in wisps over his ears. When I came over with the order pad, he said he was ready. “Don’t need a menu. I want a butterscotch sundae, a waffle, scrambled eggs, and coffee. In that order.”

“Dessert first?” I said. But he didn’t even smile.

 As I scribbled it all down, I stole a glance at his arms—long, muscular, browned but not burnt, the fine hairs bleached the color of white Karo syrup.

I came back in about fifteen minutes and laid the bill on the table. “How was your backwards meal?”

He smiled then. Maybe just to show me those teeth, straighter than fence posts. Or to show off the dimples that framed them, the one on the left cutting higher and deeper into his smooth-shaven cheek.

“Sit down for a minute.” He glanced at my nametag. “Ginna.”

I bit my lower lip. “Sorry. I’m on duty.”

He cocked his head as if a thought just came to him. “What’re you doing tomorrow?”

“Uh, well—” I began. I had to go to church and Bible school with Aunt Cille unless I planned on rooming somewhere else for the summer. My cousins Ben and Sara expected me to “visit” Sunday afternoons, which meant rocking on the front porch, playing guitars, and drinking sweet tea.

“Want to go sailing?” he asked.

I couldn’t think of anything I’d ever wanted to do more in my whole life than go sailing with the boy lounging in my booth. “I have plans.”

“Ever been sailing?” he asked.

I glanced over my shoulder and slipped into the opposite bench, the vinyl sticking to the backs of my bare legs. “I’m from Pennsylvania, a big farm. I’d have to go a long way in any direction to take out a sailboat.”

He smiled again. “So, that’s a yes?”

I stalled for time. “Well—I don’t even know your name.”

“It’s Perry. I’m an architecture major at Chapel Hill.”

The way he said Chapel Hill implied I ought to know where it was and what it was. I nodded, to disguise my ignorance.

“We have this summer place on Lake Gaston. And a thirty-foot Catalina sloop that we moor at Morningstar. It sleeps six. I took it out this morning.”

Lake Gaston. Morningstar. A sailboat that sleeps six. The words rich boy popped into my head as if Mother had erected a billboard there. “Where’s your winter home?”

 “Asheville,” he said. “You been there?”

“Heard of it.” I knew where people from Asheville bought their furniture, anyhow, thanks to Tampa.

 “You have to see it in the fall. I miss it when I’m away at college.” Right in the middle of describing the turning leaves of the Blue Ridge Mountains, I got another table. After I put in their order, Perry caught my eye and pointed to his coffee cup. While I refilled it, I couldn’t decide which I wanted to see more—his summer home or his winter home. He’d just have to invite me to both.

“How about next Sunday?” he asked.

I didn’t want to like him. He was wealthy, or his parents were, and I'd promised myself never to date a rich boy because my mother insisted I should. “I’d like that,” I said.

He stood and picked up the bill from the checked oilcloth. “Pick you up around one. Where d’you live?”

I couldn’t let a boy with two houses and a sailboat pick me up at a trailer park even if it wasn’t my trailer. I moved in closer, so the other table wouldn’t hear. “I’ll meet you here instead.”

 He let his fingers trail down my forearms until he found my hands, and tucked his bill and some money in them. He squeezed them, sending a jolt back up my arms and through my whole body. As he held my eyes in his, my body felt like sunlight, the way it glimmered on the water. Then he was gone as quickly as he came, through the glass doors, pouring his lean body into a little blue convertible. Through the dusty glass, I watched him drive away.

*

All week long, I thought about my date with Perry. I had to buy a swimsuit. I’d left my tank suit at home but hadn’t got up the nerve to sneak a new two-piece past Aunt Cille yet. On Tuesday, I asked Tampa what you wore to go sailing because I wanted her to ask me why. When she did, I sang like a mockingbird.

She frowned for a moment, considering. “Get on up to Belk’s and find ye a cotton top with big blue stripes that go this way,” she instructed. “It’s the look them Frenchy magazines has, when the models is draped all over boats and such.”

For about fifty dollars, I bought a boat-neck striped shirt, a matching bag, and a new bikini because Tampa told me, “If’n ye got it, flaunt it. And without a niggle of a doubt, ye got it, sugar!” I hated parting with all that money earned in dimes and quarters. But how could I spend a hot summer day on a thirty-foot Catalina with a boy I dreamed about for four days and no bikini?

On Friday night, I painted my toenails red like my mother did when she planned something special with my dad. Then, on Saturday, between split shifts, I dashed off to the library to read about sailing. So many strange terms! I decided I could only remember a few. To “come about” meant to change course and put the wind on the other side of the sail. To “bear up” referred to steering a ship into the wind.  To “make fast” meant to secure the lines. I’d have to help make the boat fast at the marina after our sail tomorrow.

Driving home to Aunt Cille’s, I imagined lounging on the front deck of the sailboat—the bow— in my new striped shirt, dreaming that Perry might touch my hands that way again, or even kiss me, while the wind off the lake whipped through our hair, cooling our overheated bodies.

*

Sunday school dragged on like a three-day tent revival. I had asked Aunt Cille if we could drive separately. I told her why.

Aunt Cille glared at me. “Does he know Jesus as his personal Savior?”

I suppose she had to ask that, being a Baptist and all, but I certainly hoped not. I just spent a week’s tips on a brand new bikini.

Finally, we said the closing prayer, and I was sprung. I hurried to the Waffle Shoppe and parked the old Maverick in the rear, grabbed my boat bag, and waited in one of Tampa’s booths, drinking sweet tea.

            Tampa slid into the booth across and lit a cigarette. “Are ye ready for yer big date with Daddy Warbucks’ tow-head chile?”

            “Tow-head?” I asked, slipping my hand over my nostrils. I knew about Daddy Warbucks. Who didn’t in the summer of 1977? “What’s a tow-head?”

            “That’s a blondie-haired boy. I don’t go for ’em. Don’t trust boys with hair that light.”

            I made a face that said, Of all times, please don’t tease me today.

She took a drag of her cigarette. “Get that stripey shirt I told ye ’bout?”

            I nodded. “And a tote to match.” I lifted the boat bag off the seat, reached in, and pulled out my new suit, waving it like a flag of surrender.

            She snatched it out of my hands. “Hoo-whee, that’s purty.  Be a lot of places fer him to nibble on, ye wearin’ that teeny-tiny thang.”

My face felt like someone had put a match to it. I began wheezing like the Rip van Winkles when they caught the croup.

            “Look like yer gonna pass out.”

            This happened once before when I ate too much birthday cake on an empty stomach.

            “Ye need to go lie down?”

            I shook my head, still gasping for breath.

“How ’bout a cigarette?” She took one from her apron pocket and offered it. “Allus calms my nerves.”

The thought of inhaling cigarette smoke made me feel even sicker.

“Don’ tell me yer a virgin?” Tampa asked.

All I could think about was being alone with a college boy on a sailboat that slept six. Bile from my stomach rose into my throat.

She stubbed out her butt in the ashtray. “What’ye eat tidday?”

I groaned softly. “Nothing.”

“Acid stomach. I’ll put in an order of eggs.”

I groaned louder.

“Let me get ye some fresh tea,” she said, picking up my glass. “And settle yourself!”

Settle myself. I couldn’t let Perry see me all worked up like this.

Why was I so worked up? Because I nearly died waiting all week to see those dimples again. If that’s how love felt, I loved him.

Mother once said she knew the night she met my father that she was going to marry him. Now wouldn’t that be ironic, telling our children, Perry’s and mine, that I'd had the same experience as their grandmother?

If Perry proposed today, I wouldn’t agree to marry him right off. I’d say, “I’ll think about it,” even though I knew he was the one for me. If I’d known his last name—maybe it was Poindexter; he looked like a Poindexter—I’d have written “Mrs. Perry Poindexter” on the back of my order pad all week long in different ink colors. I wanted to marry Perry Poindexter. At that moment, I'd never felt more certain of anything in my life.

Tampa set a fresh glass of iced tea on the tabletop. “He’ll be comin’ soon. Maybe he had to go to Bible school jes’ like ye.”

*

Around two-thirty, Tampa lit another cigarette and blew a rope of smoke at the ceiling. A greasy exhaust vent sucked it up like a snake charmer’s trick. “Popeye the Sailor Man ain’t gonna show.”

 I felt sharp pangs in my stomach. This time it was hunger. I ordered a tuna on toast and a glass of milk. Before I left, I slipped five dollars under the ketchup bottle since Tampa let me hang out in her booth all afternoon. But once I reached the county line, I had to pull over, because the tears made the yellow line on the road look wavy.

Why did I tell him I'm a farm girl? Didn’t I look like a one-house, no-boat, berry picking yokel parading around the Waffle Shoppe in a cheap polyester uniform with no pantyhose and K-Mart shoes? Letting a complete stranger stroke my arms and squeeze my hands. I wiped the tears away with the back of my hand.

It wasn’t right, what he did. Perry Poindexter needed to know he can’t go around standing up girls just because Mummy and Daddy have two houses and a big boat.

I yanked open the glove compartment and rifled through it. A pack of stale cigarettes, some single-ply napkins. As luck would have it, Sara had a state map hiding at the very bottom. I unfolded it and found Raleigh, and then Lake Gaston. If the legend along the side was accurate, one of my knuckles meant a sixty-mile trip up Route 401. I’d be there in two hours.

By six-fifteen, I was just south of the lake. I wandered around Littleton in vain, needing directions to the marina. No matter. If I drove due north, I’d be in the middle of the lake. I had to hit a marina soon. When I did, I’d hang out and wait. Perry would have to bring his boat in before nightfall. Waiting for him to dock, I’d think of just the thing to say to shame him so he’d think long and hard before hurting another girl’s feelings.

A sign appeared that said, “Morningstar Marina,” with an arrow pointing right. Morningstar? He mentioned that place back at the diner last Saturday.

It was just like Pastor Cornell always said, Good luck favors the righteous.

Within minutes, I was parking my Maverick in the gravel lot. But no blue convertible in sight. Maybe Perry was driving another car—his family probably had a whole barn full of them. About a hundred sailboats were moored to several floating docks that jutted into the lake like flat planked fingers. If I plopped myself on a bench dockside, I’d see everybody who came and went.  

An older man, his face tanned to wallet leather, emerged from the clubhouse and strolled over. “You waitin' for someone?”

“Yes, I am.” The raw disappointment I felt leaving the Waffle Shoppe had churned itself into a white-hot anger.

“They expecting you?”

I wondered why it mattered to him who I waited for. “I’m a guest of Perry’s.”

He looked puzzled. “Perry who?”

This guy was beginning to annoy me. “Perry who docks his thirty-foot Catalina sloop at Morningstar when he’s not out on Lake Gaston,” I said. “He’ll be heading in soon. I need to help him make his boat fast.”

The man smiled gently, as if he knew a secret. “What’s Perry’s last name?”

“I—I don’t know.” I struggled to my feet, face burning.

“Could you describe him,” he offered.

“He’s tall and tan and has blonde hair that curls around his ears,” I said, using my hands to demonstrate. “He drives a blue convertible.”

He winced. “The boy you described is named Kem. He works at Marina Fuel and Supply, pumping gas. He doesn’t own a Catalina. Nobody in his family owns a Catalina,” he said, in a tone that sounded like he was talking to the dishwasher at the Waffle Shoppe. “Kem’s a storyteller. He tells all the girls about his thirty-foot sloop, inviting them to go sailing. There ain’t a shred of truth to it, I’m afraid. Best be heading home, miss.”

“Thanks,” I said with as much dignity as I could force into my voice. I turned back to him. “Just so you know, I had him figured for a phony all along.”

 *

I learned a lot the summer I stayed with Aunt Cille. That I could always wait tables to support myself and get me through college. That sweet tea in the North was nothing like sweet tea in the South. That a hundred marijuana seeds could fit in the same pill bottle that holds thirty tetracycline capsules. And that sitting out on the porch on Sunday afternoons, especially when Ben hauled out his guitar, was sheer pleasure. Life didn’t have to be fast to be fun.

            But the hardest lesson I learned was that I was naïve about the ways of the world.  Thereafter, I decided on three things: That I’d always use my full name, Virginia. That I'd buy my own house and boat someday, instead of just dreaming they’d be handed to me. And that I’d never fall for a boy with dimples, rich or poor, again.

 

 

 

 

Yo El Rey
 

   Your friend Armando is a thin man.  He is 80 with sad Portuguese eyes and a dolorous manner that belies the fact he is likely happier than you are to be here - here with you - standing in his tiny Canyon Road Gallery, surrounded by his work.  The oils are bright and wild and just the genius side of unfinished.

   Like many old men, Armando repeats himself.  He looks you in the eye again this day and says, “My eyes are the last artist’s to have looked into the eyes of Matisse.”  Those eyes are brown and the age and the still-powerful Portuguese blood make them big and sad and you look into them hard and strain to see Matisse there staring back at you as if his reflection was etched in Armando’s eyes as the most remarkable event of his life.

   Armando met Matisse near the end in Nice, of course.  Armando was barely 22 and Matisse an old man.  The eyes of Matisse were still alive, though, and Armando befriended him and hung around unobtrusively, trying to absorb - even steal perhaps - some of the light and color that had belonged to his hero now friend and old man staggering around his home in the northern suburbs of Nice.  Matisse died of a heart attack at 84.  Suddenly, but not surprising for an old man who had suffered humiliating misunderstanding as a young painter - then reverence as one of the replacement gods of modernity. 

   Armando sought irreverence in his art after he left the dead Matisse in Nice and moved to Lisbon.  He got drunk and acted out.  He splashed paint wildly and declared himself a New Model Man.  None of it worked.  Finally, Armando struggled for relevance.  Then he inherited money and moved to Santa Fe and leased a little gallery space on the famous tourist road and made his own relevance in his own world.

   You have had sex with Armando’s wife more than once.  She is half his age.   Her name is Miranda and she is severe looking in the way of an attractive woman who follows no fashion.  She dresses for the day and wears her hair as she sees fit.   At Armando’s openings the first Friday of each month - these openings are really nothing more than Armando moving his own work in and out of the gallery - she smiles equally at the rich and the poor and the ignorant.  She will take money from any of them.  She will only take sex from you.

   There was never a plan to fuck Miranda.  There was no lust borne from watching her from your portico across the street from the gallery and their home on Canyon Road.  You saw her for what she is:  a beautiful woman with no regard for her looks,  a woman who buried herself for money in a secret place she can’t remember; a muse for a man who no longer needs one.

   Armando goes to Portugal often.  You have heard his stories of Portugal.  Port, painting, Portuguese pussy, bulls killed in secret and without honor.   Just dead, divvied up to be fed to the poor in a last meal with no meaning.  They will be full then, Armando says to you over a glass of red wine beneath the old Cottonwoods that surround the back patio of flat granite slabs, and then they shit me out and I will be a final inconvenience.  Then gone.

   He was gone when you fucked Miranda the first time.  She was wearing a wrinkled skirt of crinoline and it was hot and her skin - her Mexican skin - was brown under the thin straps of her summer shirt and her breasts filled it and the divide between them was dark and shadowed and you looked.  Her nipples poked from beneath this shirt and you saw they were large and you were aroused.  You fought this feeling at first.  It is Armando’s woman after all.  Your friend.  But her hand brushed yours when she handed the glass of Sauvignon Blanc to you over the glass table that sat on the patio with the black granite slabs.  You had slipped off your shoes and you could feel the cool, nearly damp, rock on the bottom of your feet, roughness on the ends of your toes.

   “It tastes like summer,” Miranda says, sipping the wine again.  She wore gloss and it left an imprint of her lips (and you saw they were full, passionate lips like a flower nearly in bloom).  “Like freshly cut grass smells and blue sky and maybe you can hear the sea just barely in the distance.”

   You drink, too.  She’s right.  It tastes like summer.  You are hard then and trying not to stare at her lips, or her nipples, faintly brown, erect in the summer sun.  You scrape your feet on the granite.  Still hard.

   Miranda floats away for a moment and then there is music.  Jazz.  Porgy and Bess.  You remember the record cover.  Just two people.  Miles is holding his trumpet across his leg.  A woman is reaching for the trumpet, a hand lightly wrapped around the tube beneath the mouthpiece.  The trumpet is worn.  The musician is about to give her control.

   “Let’s dance.”  Miranda stands and extends her hand.  You see it is thin and delicate but her fingers are long and you remember she played piano - almost famously - when Armando swept her away.  “It’s too beautiful not to dance.”

   You take that hand in yours and begin a slow dance to the jazz - filtered black through white and now black again.  She moves close and you can feel her breasts lightly touching your own beneath your white shirt.  It was short-sleeved and had buttons and you had worn it because it was summer and you felt free and fancy before you walked from your studio to the gallery and the house across the street where your friend Armando had left his woman in your care.

   Without thinking your hand brushes across her ass, once, twice, then rests there.  She does not object.  Or even flinch.  She presses closer and your hand feels skin beneath her skirt and moves outward to her hip.  You are hard and she knows.  You feel her hip, the curve of the thigh all the way to the waist and you remember this is the most beautiful part of a woman’s body.   You kiss her.  The lips are softer than you expected.  She kisses you.  The gloss ever so slightly sticks your lips together, then lets them go and they come together again.  Then the tongues.

   You lick her as she lays on the soft, cloudy couch just inside the door from the granite porch.  You remember:  this is not all of her, it is part of her and up you go over her belly, the swollen-nipple breasts and to her mouth.  You understand Miranda now and you kiss and your tongues twist and you enter her and - finally - you come.

   Miranda carefully lays you down just so on the pillow beside her.  Her lips are puffier and tinged with red from your kisses.  She smiles and lays back on your shoulder and spreads her legs and softly begins to knead herself.   Time is elongated and you hear her short, sharp breaths.  You see how beautiful her eyes are closed.  You see her chest heave and flush.  You see the line of her hair around her forehead and you draw it in your mind as the most wonderful shoreline of an impossible world.  She comes.

   You try not to let it bother you, this sudden turn of events.  Armando needn’t know, you think.  No reason for her to say and you are certainly not.  Reason has no role here.  Guilt, regret and a certain machismo-driven sense of accomplishment.  All have taken the place of reason.

   “I return from these trips more convinced than ever I am right,” Armando says at dinner a few weeks later, loosely balling up his napkin, then it on his spent plate of pasta and sauce.  He drinks red wine and the light of the candles comes through the wine and the glass and is diffused into the flickering dark of the granite porch.   You finish chewing your last bite of pasta and notice the dramatic pause.

   “Right about what, Armando?” you say, reaching for your own glass of red wine, noticing there is no diffuse light from the candles bleeding through it, only the reflection of the erratic, dancing yellow of the candles.

   “It is more palpable over there in Portugal, Europe, the Continent - the idea of everything having already been done, of no possibility of greatness any longer.  Fame, yes, riches, of course, but, greatness, I don’t think we will see it again,” Armando says with his sad Spanish eyes watery and bathed in light. “Picasso, Hemingway, Pollock, Faulkner…Matisse.  These aren’t just names.  These men saw in a different way, spoke the language in a whole new way - colors, symbols, rhythm - this was their language.”

   “Didn’t Fitzgerald already say that, but better?” says Miranda, no longer so enthralled by Armando, who she thought was plenty great in the beginning.   She rolls her eyes a bit and looks up to the black sky over the patio and beyond the candlelight.  You look, too, and you can make out stars.

   “One of the greats, as well,” Armando says raising his glass of wine that now turns a beautiful garnet in the light of the candles - one burning wanly in the center of the table and a few more waver on the low adobe wall around the edge of the porch of granite stone.  “There can be no one great again because this culture” - he nearly spat the word – “will not permit it.  Their language has already said everything.”

   Armando drinks from the glass of wine and looks at you.  Your heart skips a beat because those eyes just said he knew.

   You lay low for a while.  You pace the floor of the sunroom you pronounced a studio the day you moved in.  The square of white sits on the easel reflecting nothing, not even light.  It is a white space you have to fill.  You have nothing to say.  No idea to fill it with.  Armando could be right, you say to yourself, now sitting in a straight wooden chair from the kitchen table and starting at this empty canvas and seeing an image much like the one the guy who sets the camera up over a boxing ring sees:  an empty square, defined on four sides, waiting to be turned into a place of decision.

   Your mind wanders to Miranda.  You project yourself through the adobe of your old rental, through the walls of Armando’s house and search for her on the sofa, on the patio, on the bed.  Your mind cannot find her there.

   So it finds her here.  You step up to the canvas and you open a tube of oil.  Black.  You squeeze.  You daub the brush, and then apply pressure and the brush is coated.  You paint her in swipes as if the oil were charcoal.  The semi-circle of her hairline.  The arch of her back in orgasm.  Her brown nipples out of kilter, the breasts undefined.  Her mouth.  The center of the universe.

    Armando is your friend.  Friends can only be avoided so long.  “You have been scarce my friend,” Armando says at your front door, bottle of Languedoc in his hand.  “It’s summer.  Time for a drink with the French.”  Armando walks in with a large hand wrapped around the neck of the bottle.  “It’s one of my favorites,” you say, heading for the kitchen and nervously plucking two glasses from the cupboard.  The painting of Miranda has not moved since you put the brush down.  It was ragged but it was a beautiful ragged and you have not made up your mind: finished or not finished?

   You hand Armando a glass and try to ignore the painting.  “How have you been, Armando?”  You sit across from him and cross your legs.  You are nervous.  He has brought a corkscrew and plops the cork out.  He pours.  You first.  Then him.  You sip once, twice, a third time.

   His sorrowful eyes - sadder now than ever - turn from you toward the painting.  His face remains still. 

   “Do you remember my Hyacinths?” Armando asks, his eyes never wavering from the painting.  “My apogee, now that I’m old enough to realize it.  No one understood it at first.  No one understood the almost microscopic attention I paid to a few lines of a poem and only the smallest part of a large flower.”

   He looks at you now.  You remember the Hyacinths.  Pale green, white muted enamel filling canvas after canvas.  The soaring white, moving in shapes across the muted green.   It was all based on a few lines of The Wasteland.  “The smallest part makes up the meaning of the whole.”

   Armando, your friend, looks back at the painting.  “The hairline is unmistakable.”

   You feel the icy fear of being revealed.  You are pinned to a board and writhing.  There is no avoiding this.  It’s here.  Now.

   Armando drinks from his glass.  “I suppose it should not surprise me.” 

   “Why shouldn’t it?” you ask.

   “She is beautiful.  You are much younger than I am.  You have talent.”

   “Thank you.  She is.  Age is meaningless.”

   Armando smiles.  “Easy for you to say.  Just wait.  Picasso lived past 90 and stayed virile and relevant.  Hemingway became irrelevant and old and blew his head off just past 60.  Age has grave meaning.  You have no idea until you get to the end of age.”

   The end of age.  This turns over in your brain.  You drink from your glass.

   Armando stands, bends over the glass table separating you and pours himself another glass of Languedoc.  It is dark wine red and no light courses through it in your studio despite the sunlight in this front room of your house.  Armando walks to the painting and looks intently.

   The cat is out of the bag - you think - now it’s just going to be about the painting.

   “My Hyacinths were much larger than this,” Armando says.  “Better to magnify the minutia.  She is very beautiful - this Miranda.  Isn’t it amazing how the tiny details blind us, make us not realize they are only tiny details?  Love is one of those details.  A detail that comes into focus when you put it into the larger context of an entire life.  At least a life well spent.”

   “The detail of love is one I seem to have overlooked,” you say. 

   “Do you love her?” he says facing you and nodding toward the painting. 

   You honestly had not considered it.  “I may,” you say.

   He drank from his glass and his Portuguese eyes looked over the edge of the glass and into yours.  These are not the eyes of Matisse, you think; these are my eyes, my mind, my feelings.  I am no one to anybody but me.  You feel your oneness being invaded by Miranda and - instead of running away from it - you accept it.  She is the one.

   You clear your throat.  “I think I do.”

   Armando smiles at you.  “Years ago I would have beaten the shit out of you and then painted my triumph. Now my shadow is coming up to meet me.  I was never the champ, not the real champion of anything, no matter what the arena:  canvas, a bed.

   “I am going back to Portugal for good.   Your work here,” Armando points casually at the painting in black oil applied thinly as if it were charcoal, “is true.  She’s yours if she will have you.”

   “I don’t think she is yours to give,” you say.

   Your friend Armando looks at you once more, maybe one last time, with his dolorous eyes, “Of course she is.  She was my muse.  My Hyacinth Girl.  I sacrificed everything to her.   She is mine to give.”

   You sit and look at Armando.  He is handsome and you have seen photographs of him younger when he was the love of women and men.  Armando was well known - but not famous - well off but not rich - good but not great.  But he was good-looking   He was so much more than his looks (and he tried to tell us all by focusing on the finite; the smaller picture of the whole) but no one got past that detail.  You both stand and he turns for the door and stops with his hand on the worn brass knob:  “The muse takes more than she gives.  Always.”

   Your friend does not shake your hand; he hugs you tightly, opens the door and walks away.

   You are alone now.  Standing in your sunroom studio.  Alone with your Miranda.  Alone with your books.  Alone with a half-empty bottle of Languedoc.

   Alone except for her.  You cross the street.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The fan whirred softly above. Ruth listened to the off balance pattern that gave it a hypnotic quality, only interrupted by the occasional clinking of silverware on ceramic, knife scraping against plate, fork hitting glass.

Uhh-whrrr. Uhh-whrrr. Uhh-whrrr. Uhh-whrrr…

She cleared her throat. “I said, ‘How’s the fish, Daddy.’”

Steven Pilcher looked up from his paper. “It’s very good, honey,” he whispered. He looked down at his plate. Though he had taken a few bites, he was seeing it for the first time. “Delicious.”

Most people that he talked to were put off by her dad’s low volume. They found it a little creepy or it just made them suspicious, like he was hiding something. But then he only talked to a handful of people anyway. Ruth was used to it. She knew he just didn’t have much to say anymore.

“You forgot to sign my permission slip for school.”

Uhh-whrrr. Uhh-whrrr…

“Daddy?”

“Hmmm?”

“You forgot to sign my permission slip for school. I have to turn it in tomorrow or I can’t go on the field trip.”

“I did?”

Uhh, yeah! As she had laid out his clothes to wear each morning, Ruth carefully placed the permission slip on top so it would have to be moved to get to the attire. Each morning he moved it aside, oblivious. The last two evenings as she had prepared his lunch for the following day, Ruth put a copy inside the lunchbox and taped a note to the outside that read in block letters, “SIGN PERMISSION SLIP.” Nothing.

“Yeah, but that’s okay.” She slid the paper and a pen over to him. She sat directly across the small table from her dad, having taken over her mother’s old spot nearly a year ago for a practical reason - more elbow room.  “I know you’ve been really busy at work and tied up with your newspaper.”

Steven Pilcher took the permission slip and gazed at it. “What’s this all about?”

“It’s a field trip for school. Remember? I told you. Our freshman and sophomore world history classes are going to a museum.”

“I don’t know,” he said softly. “It sounds kind of dangerous. You know your mother… your mother used to go out on her own sometimes.”

“Daaa-aad! It’s a school function with lots of parents and teachers chaperoning. God. It’s not like I’m going out with, well, friends.” This last word came out with the hiss of an overheated radiator, surprising even Ruth.

“Of course.” Pilcher scribbled his signature and slid the slip of paper back across the table. “How are your friends…um…”

“Sarah and Megan?”

“Yeah. How are they? I haven’t seen them in a while. You should have them over.”

That’s because they don’t exist. Ruth had picked the names off the top of her head, changing them up every few months when her dad remembered to care and ask about them. She could have just as easily said Gertrude and Penelope. “They’re fine. We’re going the museum together.”

“Museum?”

“You know, the field trip.”

“Right. That sounds fun.”

“They might come over for a while afterward,” she added unnecessarily, “to study.”

“Oh.” He managed a thin smile and the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes furrowed, a thinly veiled grimace like the times he would try to pretend he and her mother had not just had a huge fight. “That’s great.” He went back to his newspaper.

Watching his zombie state day after day, month after month, was getting old. So old. But it wasn’t his fault. Not fully. Her dad had never been the outgoing type. But with her mom’s help he had at least put forth an effort. To be sociable. To be neighborly. To get out into the world on occasion. But when her mom left, so did the effort. No. It wasn’t just a loss of effort, something had changed in him. A knob had been turned down, from slow to just before it clicks to off. His mothers last act before disappearing, intentional or not, was to reach inside of him and click him into sleep mode. And perhaps she had bumped something she wasn’t supposed to in the process. 

The thought made her smile. Not at first, but because it made her think of the way they used to play games together. The three of them. Her mother and father smiling and joking. Scrabble. Mousetrap. Operation. But while trying to cut out his broken heart she must have bumped the edge, not enough to trip the buzzer and alarm anyone, but surely the red bulb had flickered, enough to just loosen or short that connection that led to his stability. Because the heart bone’s connected to the head bone.

He did still go to and from work everyday. Not his newspaper work, but his real job at the office. Ruth hadn’t visited there in years, but she remembered his desk, his cube, among many, many others, all identical. And stacks of papers, files. She wondered if he talked to people there. He had to, didn’t he? To function? Maybe? And maybe she and her dad could go out to a movie this weekend. Not likely, but she would keep trying.

“How was your day?”

Uhh-whrrr. Uhh-whrrr…

Ruth got up and went to the sink to refill her water. She noticed streaks on the outside of the window running through the light layer of dust. Their windows needed cleaned badly, still. The light was on at the house across the street. The new neighbors. Only a woman, and a boy about her age she thought. Ruth turned off the fluorescent light above the sink to make out the outline of two heads behind the curtain becoming more and then less distinct by the fluctuating light of their TV. One might have just raised glass to mouth. “We should go meet the new neighbors,” she said to the window.

Setting her glass down, Ruth went to the stove and retrieved the vegetable bowl that she had microwaved the cauliflower and broccoli in. It was glass or something glass-like. Pyrex, maybe? Was that a real word? She called it the veggie bowl because it had only ever held vegetables. No meats. No sauces. Her mother had said anything else would taint the taste of the veggies. Maybe not the first time, but eventually. And bending the rules was a slippery slope. So she had called it the veggie bowl. And so had Ruth. And if her dad were to call it anything he would call it the veggie bowl too.

Ruth bumped her father’s arm with her hip, jostling his paper. “Oops. Sorry, Daddy. I just wanted to give you some more veggies.” She added a spoonful to his untouched pile.

“So how’s you paper?”

“Fine.”

Ruth sat back down at her plate. “It looks finished.”

It was truly his paper. His creation. Neighborhood News. He wrote all of the articles. He created all of the fake advertisements. He edited it. He put it together. He printed it on the old hand-lopping press in the basement. He read it. He and he alone. It was his hobby.

“Maybe you could start delivering it. Or even better, I could deliver it for you. You know, I could be the papergirl. Just to a few houses.” He looked up at her with something close to horror. “Or maybe you could give out just one - to the new neighbors. You know, to welcome them.” His eyes narrowed on her and Ruth felt she was being studied, assessed. It was an unfamiliar feeling, yet somehow comfortable, as if awakened from her past and she sat up straighter in her chair.

“It’s not finished,” Pilcher muttered.

“It will never be perfect, Daddy. At least not in your eyes. I just think, well, what’s the point of art if you’re not going to share it?”

And then he looked at her. Really looked at her and held her gaze. “My goodness, when did you get so big?” he whispered.

Ruth felt herself flushing and smiling, both impulsive acts, but she wouldn’t look away. She didn’t want to lose his gaze. When would he fix his eyes on her again?

“You’ve become a young woman. So beautiful.”

Ruth felt her eyes beginning to water. Her dad’s face was beginning to blur. She wondered if she could really handle this attention. She had wanted it, but was she ready for it? She was so out of practice.

“You’re looking just like your mother, Phyllis.”

Ruth’s eyes faltered and then fell away, her face now burning. Suddenly she wanted to get away - to get out of the room and she didn’t know why. And did he just call her Phyllis? Or was he simply stating her mother’s name? As if Ruth wouldn’t remember it without his reminder?

“I have an admission.” Pilcher cleared his throat, straightening himself a bit, and a nervous smile flittering on the corners of his mouth. “I gave one out today.”

Huh? Maybe he was losing it. And then it dawned on her and a hopeful smile leapt onto her face against her better judgment. “A paper?”

He nodded quickly, looking like a child, half proud and half afraid he was going to get in trouble. Ruth wanted to scream. She wanted to leap across the table and hug him. But he didn’t like to be touched.

“Oh my God, Daddy! That’s wonderful. How did…I mean where were…Who? Who did you give it too?”

“The new neighbors. It’s not a big deal.”

“But it is. This is wonderful.” Ruth felt her joy getting away from, her like a runaway train. “You know what this means? If you give it to one, you can give it to more. You can start doing real interviews of people in the community. You know, like profiles. We could get real advertisements to help pay for it. I can help with all that stuff. I don’t mind talking to people. We could become a real newspaper. I’ll leave that old press to you because it scares me but we could-“

Her father had shrank back into his chair, his face pale. He held up a shaky hand to Ruth, to slow her down or to ward her off, as if in his eyes she had just transformed from the angelic Phyllis into some demon.

Too fast. You’re scaring him, stupid. “Or not.” She tried to put on the breaks. “One paper is good. Even better really. So were they appreciative? You know, thankful?”

Uhh-whrrr. Uhh-whrrr…

“What were they like? What were their names?”

Pilcher cleared his throat. “I’m not sure. They weren’t home so I put it in their mailbox.”

“Oh.” You mean you waited until they weren’t home.

“They probably wouldn’t have wanted to be bothered anyway.” Pilcher lifted his paper higher until it separated them.

Ruth nodded meekly and tried to smile.

Uhh-whrrr. Uhh-whrrr…

She absently picked the lemon wedge from her plate squeezed a few drops on her fish. The juice made her raw and cracked fingertips scream. They were red and cut, tortured from another night of tearing at her bedpost, the square wood now pitted and gouged, the corners gone, as if demons were turning it into a heavy baseball bat or some other striking device. One side for her mother for doing this to them, one side for her father for letting go and forcing her to pick up the slack, surrendering any chance of a normal social existence. And one side for her; for her shame at the hate she felt during those times and the guilt for not being unconditionally supportive. Ruth squeezed the lemon again, this time making the acidic drops fall directly onto her open wounds. The last side of the bedpost was clean, unblemished; the wood smooth as a mirror. She was saving this side. In the hope that everything would turn out all right. The fourth side was for hope.

Pilcher stood. “I need to get back to work.” He began folding up his newspaper and knocked over his untouched milk in the process. “Oh.”

Oh? That’s it? “That’s okay, Daddy. I’ll get it. You go on down and work on your paper.”

“Thanks, honey,” he muttered. “It was delicious.”

He left and Ruth watched from her chair as the milk river flowed around her father’s plate and past the vase of flowers. They were wilting. Her father’s footsteps padded down the stairs. Finally the river reached the edge and after a pause, a moment of gathering, cascaded over the precipice, spattering on the worn linoleum. Niagara Falls. Maybe they could go to Niagara Falls. She had always wanted to, ever since she was a child. It looked so beautiful in the pictures. Majestic. And it would be all strangers there. No one her father would have to talk to. She could do the talking.

She stood and took her plate to the sink. The spattering milk had joined the ceiling fan in the makeshift domestic rhythm section.

Uhh-whrrr-pink-pink-pink-uhh-whrrr-pink-pink-pink…

Ruth scraped the rest of her fish into the trash. The garbage disposal had stopped working months ago. Could it be connected to that same loose wire that ran from her dad’s heart to his head? Could it be as simple as that? Maybe everything mixed up in this world was all connected by the same wire, such a long, tangled nest of kite string no one would ever be able to figure it out. And if they did manage to fix something, it only made something go haywire somewhere else.

Tomorrow. Maybe tomorrow she would suggest Niagara Falls. Subtly. She wouldn’t let her excitement get away from her. She would take it slow. What was the hurry? But tonight she had work to do. She had to clean up this mess. And then she would set out some clothes for her dad. Then her homework and a shower. In the morning, breakfast and pack their lunches and get him off to work. She needed to pick up a few groceries on the way home from school. She would make a list. But tomorrow night, during supper maybe, they could talk about Niagara Falls. Tomorrow.

Ruth looked out the dirty window and across the street to the new neighbors’ house. She pulled several sheets off of the paper towel roll and went to clean up the spilled milk.