A Parallel Life (10 page)

“They were trashy people,” my father said. “Trashy people do trashy things.”

“They died for love,” Lorraine said.

“They died because of love,” I said. “It's different.” Lorraine and Tom and I were driving around after school in my father's Studebaker, a ridiculous car, that my father had bought several years ago because he thought it was
what the cars of the future would look like and, by buying it as soon as it came out, he would be recognized as a visionary during his lifetime. We had just driven by the hill of pine knots beside the pine oil factory. An old straw-hatted man was driving the bulldozer today. Several other cars were also driving by the pine oil factory, which was unusual. Hardly any traffic ever went along this pothole-pitted back street. I figured if we saw any of the same cars passing by our next stop, Carmichael's, we'd know that we were part of some sort of sorry pilgrimage.

There was a small crowd at Carmichael's, a narrow place between the hardware and a florist, more than you'd expect at 3:30 on a Friday afternoon. People our age didn't go to Carmichael's. It didn't have a jukebox, just a radio tuned to a station that played country music alternating with farm bulletins. Afternoons were for the pie-and-coffee set, the local businessmen, the farmers who came into town for the day, and women who'd spent a taxing afternoon at the Ben Franklin or Shultz's Dry Goods.

“This was her dress,” I heard one of the waitresses—a fat woman with tight blue sausage curls and small close-set eyes—say to a woman in a red flowered house coat. “She left it on this peg here in the hall and changed into a regular dress in the ladies' room. She was wearing a little rabbit-fur jacket she'd just gotten, and I think he probably helped her pay for it, because how else . . .?”

“However else . . .?” the woman in red echoed as if there was really no question about that sort of thing. She looked at the dress but stood back from it as if it might be carrying some disease the way that blankets the white men gave to the Indians carried smallpox germs.

“This was her dress, Ruth,” the woman in red said to
another woman who came up to her. I slid along behind them and went to the ladies' room and waited inside next to the door until they'd gone. Then I came out and passed the dress, brushing against it, letting it touch my face. It was a pink cotton dress with a white collar and cuffs. I closed my eyes for a second, feeling it against my cheek. It smelled of sweat and Evening in Paris dusting powder. I knew about Evening in Paris. My father sold it. My mother preferred Coty's.

“They had the radio tuned to ‘Randy's Record Shop.' ” Tom said as I slid into the booth next to him. Lorraine sat across from us twisting her hair around her finger and looking at the men in the room. I could see her giving eye contact to someone and I turned slightly to check it out. It was Mr. Demarie, the mailman. He was good looking but he was also almost old enough to be Lorraine's father.

“Watch it, Lorraine,” I said, “Or they'll be vacuuming you off the backseat of some old Chevrolet.”

“That's disgusting,” Lorraine said and pushed her order of fried onion rings away. “I'm going to puke.”

“God,” Tom said. “That really was disgusting, Patsy!” His face was pale with shock. “You don't have to be so specific. Lorraine's not that kind of person.”

“Right,” I said. “Let's talk about how their radio was tuned to ‘Randy's.' ”

“I just thought it was interesting. That's the same station we listen to late at night.”

“That's the station everyone listens to,” Lorraine said.

“Thank you, Lorraine,” I said, reaching out to pick up one of her onion rings. Just as I was about to take a bite, a small white-haired man came into the restaurant and paused in the doorway to stare down the row of booths.

“I know what you're all talking about!” he said loud enough for everybody to stop whatever they were doing and look at him. He, in turn, took the time to fix each person for an instant with his own look. He had a narrow face and huge white eyebrows like the wings of a moth over tiny, glaring black eyes.

“Oh my God,” Lorraine said. “It's the minister from the church over in Bethel. He preached at our church once.”

There was a sudden silence as the white-haired man raised his arms and said, “Remember Proverbs! ‘Can a man take fire to his bosom, and his garments not be burned?' ” Then he turned and walked out. A nervous laughter began and closed the gap he'd left.

I broke the crust of the onion ring with my teeth and let the flavor of the soft onion rest on my tongue. “I want to find the place where they parked.”

“No you don't,” Lorraine said. She gave Tom a pleading look, as if he might talk sense to me.

“It's miles away,” Tom said. “Almost to the state line.”

“You don't have to come,” I said and stood up and dangled the keys to the ridiculous Studebaker in front of them.

She didn't. But Tom did. We took Little Savannah Road north for eleven miles and then turned east toward Mississippi and drove for another three or four miles on a narrow blacktop and then turned off on a gravel road through clay hills and pine woods. I had a map that the blue-haired waitress had drawn for me on a napkin.

We weren't the only ones on the trail. We followed a pickup through a cloud of red dust. The pickup turned off and wound along a logging road and then stopped in a clearing. There was another car already there, an old
Plymouth with a man and woman in the front seat. They started up the engine and drove away as soon as we pulled up. The two guys in the pickup stopped but kept the engine running and looked out of the window, the driver motioning and pointing. Then they drove off, too.

“It's just you and me,” I said to Tom when the dust settled. I had turned off the engine. “And this is it.”

“Yeah,” he said softly and opened the door. He stepped out and looked around.

I got out my side. The sun had made the smell of pine strong like incense in the hot dry air. Cicada sounds grew and then died as we walked toward the edge of the clearing. Through the pines the leaves of a sweet gum tree flashed red as the sun angled down on it.

Tom sat on a log. I sat beside him.

“Why do you care about this so much?” he asked. It was a good question.

“I don't know. It just seems important.”

“I don't understand. They were two people you didn't even know.”

“It's real, Tom,” I said, annoyed at this detachment. I almost wished Meat had let him look in the car. “What they did and what happened to them is real. It's the only thing in the whole world right now that seems real to me.”

“What do you want from this?” he asked.

“To take fire to my bosom, Tom. Like the man said.”

“You scare me,” he said and got up and went back to the car. Neither of us spoke all of the way home.

“Tomorrow night,” I said when I dropped him off.

That night I lay in my bed and listened through the walls for any sounds that might come from my parents'
room. There never were any. Every night mother stayed up reading or sewing and my father went to bed early. At nine-thirty each night, my father went to the bathroom and brushed his teeth. Then he went to their room and put on his pajamas, read in bed for about ten minutes and then turned off the bed light. At ten-thirty or eleven, my mother turned off the lights in the living room and the kitchen and came upstairs to the bathroom, brushed her teeth, put Nivea cream on her face, and went into their bedroom. They never closed the door entirely, but left it open a crack so that if either my brother or I moaned in the night or tossed in our beds, we would instantly be heard and attended. The partially open door was to let us know that they lay in their bed on call. Whatever else they did in that bed they did in such cautious silence that I had grown to suspect that my brother and I were both adopted.

As I listened for my parents to make some sound, I thought about her, about the pink dress she left and the rabbit-fur jacket she wore. About eating cotton candy when she was stranded on the top of the Ferris wheel with a man whose wife and mother-in-law and children were all in church. Wondering why she was on the wheel at all, looking down at the light bulbs on the spokes, and the blurred faces of the crowd looking up, and wanting only to be with him in the dark and to touch him, wanting only to get back to earth and into the dark and touch him.

We were in Tom's mother's Buick on the backseat. It was Saturday night and we were parked in the clearing at the end of a logging road in the piney woods. We had turned the radio to “Randy's Record Shop,” and it was playing rhythm and blues from some mountaintop in Tennessee. The heater was on but Tom had all four windows
opened an inch. He would go along with me—but only so far.

We kissed. His arm was around me and I had my head up. I opened my mouth for his tongue. His free hand came up under my blouse and unhooked my brassiere. I unbuttoned his shirt and reached under his undershirt and felt skin. I slid my hands down and started on his belt buckle. He reached under my skirt and tugged on my panties. We got undressed quickly. I had the rubbers. I had taken them from my father's store. He kept them behind the counter so that people would have to ask for them.

In a minute Tom was sitting naked on top of me. Behind him two beams from the headlamps of an approaching car reached through the trees and found him. The beams struck his body and he became a silhouette with light flaring behind him like the pale flames from an eclipsed star. He shivered as if the flames were cold and I shivered too and then felt him inside of me. Then the lights went out and left us once more in the dark.

She was buried on Monday. I cut class and walked the six blocks from the school to the cemetery. I didn't want either Tom or Lorraine with me. There was only a handful of people at the graveside, but cars, driving extra slow, passed by almost constantly. It started to rain about halfway through the service, a cold sleety rain. I stood under a tree until the service was over and then I went home and went to bed.

He was buried the next day in a cemetery up at Bethel. I didn't go. There's only so much you can learn from things like this.

W
HEN I BROUGHT
my aunt her groceries, she was on the phone to the cemetery—All Souls. It's an old one—though not the oldest—and the crypts of most of the families we know are there. This is New Orleans, you understand, and because the town is literally floating, we put our dead in tombs above the ground and wait for time, not worms, to do the job.

My aunt Liz is my mother's older sister, and, like my mother, she's small and feisty. “Well, how much does it cost to move bones from the upper level?” Liz said into the phone. It's an ancient wall phone and she had to stand on tiptoe to talk into it. For years she's had to stand on tiptoe to talk into the phone and that may account for the fact that she always sounds breathless and exasperated to whoever happens to be on the other end. I love Liz's voice. You could grate cheese with it.

I never appreciated the New Orleans accent, a combination of magnolia consonants and Brooklyn vowels, until now that I'm a thirty-six-year-old refugee from a dozen bland years in California. I'd gone west because I heard it never rained there and that mosquitoes and cockroaches were seen only in cameo appearances in horror movies. In California, I'd married, divorced, and held a series of jobs just good enough to delay what I'd always known would be my inevitable return to this soggy place.

“What do you mean, a coffin has to be biodegradable? That's soap, isn't it?” she said and motioned for me to sit
down. “Listen, my niece Maggie is here. She does my shopping for me and I have to visit with her.”

I began to unpack groceries, moving aside an almost empty bottle of Coca-Cola, an ashtray full of the twisted stumps of cigarettes, and a half-dozen glasses with various levels of the brown liquid in the bottoms. Liz hasn't had company. She just takes down a new glass whenever she has another drink of Coke. Toward the end of the day she washes up. She scowled as she listened. When she saw me looking at her she pointed to the phone and then twirled her index finger next to her temple. “You're an idiot,” she said finally into the mouthpiece and slammed the earpiece into its stirrup.

“Who was that?” I asked.

“I'm moving Raymond's bones,” she said. “Did you get Coke?”

I whipped out a big bottle and twisted off the cap. She reached into the freezer for a tray of ice and began to pop cubes into two fresh glasses.

“Raymond's bones?”

“I'm losing sleep over this.” She sat and lit a Lucky with a kitchen match. “His sister Lucille is dying. She's got cancer and she's not going to make it. She's not going to want to be buried in Lake Charles. She's going to want to come back here and join the rest of the bunch.”

“So?”

“So? So Raymond's on the top level now, but when Lucille dies, she'll get his place. That's the way it is. When someone dies, out goes the old coffin, in goes the new, and the latest bones get thrown in with the others down below. After that happens I'll never know which are his when I get our own crypt. You look at a pile of bones and how are you going to tell who's who?”

“I thought
you
were going to be buried in Raymond's family's crypt, too.”

“I changed my mind.”

I kept unpacking the bags and putting things away. Two packages of CDM coffee and chickory. Rice. Red beans. Ham hocks. Bologna. Pay Day candy bars. A carton of Luckies. Cinnamon rolls. Liz doesn't want to see anything green on her plate—not even parsley.

“I never liked his family and I'll be damned if I'm going to be buried in that crypt with them. They were nothing but snobs—all of them. His mother pretended she couldn't remember my name. She always called me Helene. That was a girlfriend of his from tenth grade. I didn't even like the way that family smelled.” She tore open a bag of potato chips and began crunching them. She wasn't wearing her dentures and the ability to crunch without teeth seemed to calm her a bit.