Aquamarine (12 page)

Everyone of course refers to Walnut Farm, where William lives, as the nut farm. Local boys rush up the drive on their bikes, hurl a few insults like rolled newspapers, then peel back out, fishtailing through the gravel as they go. William and his friends, the younger crew at the home, don’t seem to take these too much to heart.

They wave back at the boys—variously waving to them and waving them away—then take their insults and turn them on each other in what seems to Jesse a pretty sophisticated defusing mechanism. They call each other “retard” and “dope” and mock each other’s idiosyncrasies, as they see them. This is selective appraisal, though, what they consider goofy. For instance, while they seem to find making faces—crossing eyes, waggling tongues, wiggling ears—extremely witty, they consider pratfalls childish. They play to each other a lot and don’t let themselves be intruded on too much by an outer world that is always out of synch with them.

The home stands behind an enormous sloping lawn. It is an old farmhouse and a large barn. It’s a working farm. Under supervision, the men and women who live here raise vegetables and a small summer cash crop of corn. They keep a dozen milk cows and a coopful of chickens. William likes it here pretty well, he has friends. But he is also always eager by Friday afternoon to come home for two days of a more concentrated sort of attention, a more direct kind.

Everyone is out on the lawn, playing a loose, heat-induced, dreamy variant of baseball. Jesse and Kit get out of the car and sit on the hood to watch. It’s as though someone here heard a game or two on the radio, and they’re working off that. There are way too many fielders, maybe ten, William among them. And two batters, standing a ways apart. The trick seems to be who’ll get pitched to.

“Well,” Kit says. “Why not?”

Jesse is smiling with having been discovered. William is loping across the lawn, through the middle of the game. The other players aren’t too bothered by this, no more than they are by the sprinkler fanning away in the middle of the field.

She watches William coming toward her and floods with feeling. She can never see him plain and simple, for what he is. He always comes wrapped in their shared past. Jesse’s growing up was, unavoidably, a lot about Willie. Because of him, modifications had to be made constantly, the center moved from where it ordinarily would have been, over onto him. Money had to be siphoned off for schools, special programs. Attention had to be paid by all of them in huge amounts to carry him over his frustration at not being understood, not understanding.

And Jesse—by virtue of being normal, regular—was discounted for being so privileged, expected to excel because how dare she not, given such an advantage. She was also expected not to disappear exactly, more to recede into a neutral state of transparency, to not quite fully exist. And so although Jesse loves her brother so much she can feel the muscle of her heart spasm slightly in moments like this, on first seeing him after an absence, she also resents him for having taken up all the available childhood in their house.

He looks less like himself than the last time Jesse saw him, more like a generic retarded person. One of the drawbacks of institutional living, she guesses. He is heavier and walks like his friends, flatfooted, fiddling his fingers in front of him as he goes. It’s the walk of a thirty-six-year-old man who has never worn a suit or driven a car or negotiated a deal.

“Boyohboyohboy,” he’s saying as he approaches. He picks up speed, starts running full-tilt toward Jesse. Then stops short by a few feet and stands there twitching with shyness, running his thumbs back and forth under the waistband of his brown pants.

“Well, excuse me, but have you seen my brother, Willie?” Jesse says.

This sends his gaze rushing with shyness to the ground.

“The last time I saw him, he was wearing blue pants. He did look a bit like you though, I must say.”

“Me.”

“But no,” Jesse says, putting a Jack Benny hand to her cheek and looking him over. “He had long hair.”

William runs a hand over his hair, which is cut in a sculptured way Jesse hasn’t seen before.

She pats his small belly. “And my brother didn’t have this.”

He giggles and she gives up the game, letting herself get crushed in a hug. “Oh, Cowboy.” Then she pulls back a little to make introductions. “This is Kit.”

William nods with sureness and says, “From Ferris.”

Ferris is the grade school Jesse went to. It’s still there, a block from her mother’s house, a fortress of sooty brick and small windows designed to intimidate children. William didn’t go there. By that time, they already knew he wouldn’t be going to regular school. He would walk Jesse to the corner in the mornings, and be waiting there for her when she got out in the afternoons. The duty girl on that corner was Kitty Hanes. William remembers the most amazing bits of nothing from a million years back, and then goes out forgetting he has put on socks but not shoes.

“No,” she tells him. “A new Kit.”

But he has become distracted by the baseball game. Everyone is in an uproar. Three or four people are running the bases clockwise. Everyone is clamoring for order, but of many different sorts.

When they finally get him into the car, Kit climbs in back, deferring to William, who then gets in back with her anyway. Jesse chauffeurs them back to her mother’s and listens over her shoulder.

“I know a lot about you,” Kit says. “Jesse talks about you all the time.”

“How?”

“Oh, Willie this and Willie that.”

“Willie what?”

“Willie’s the best.”

In the rearview, Jesse sees his eyes flutter lightly shut, which is what they do when he’s blissed out. She wants to stop the car and get out and lift Kit over her head. Buy her all the flowers in some shop. Make her a little cheese soufflé.

When they pull up in front of the house, there’s a customized van in the drive. It’s iridescent blue with Plexiglas bubble portholes in the side, surrounded by a lush painted landscape featuring pine trees and a running brook and deer, a few rabbits down by the gas tank. On the back, across the door inside quote marks is scripted,
My Way.

“Darrell,” William says.

“Oh my,” Kit says, and reaches over the seat back to tousle Jesse’s hair.

Jesse hasn’t met Darrell. When her mother began mentioning him in letters, Jesse imagined a fat man with small shoulders, bad at golf, full of talk about his grandchildren. Of course, nothing she could have imagined in any direction would have fully prepared her for Darrell. He is such a surprising candidate for her mother’s affections that Jesse has had to rethink her notions of who her mother really is.

When the pictures came, Jesse saw he was younger than her mother by about ten years. In style and build and general demeanor, Darrell resembles a white Chuck Berry. Jesse’s mother met him through her church social group. Darrell plays pedal steel in a country-rock band that played at one of their dances. Weekends, his group appears at the Blue Light, a notorious roadhouse out by Bedelia. The place is strung with fat blue Christmas lights around the windows, boarded up to keep down the breakage on weekends. A lot of the patrons bring guns with them, to settle questions of etiquette.

“I think Darrell is my mother’s equivalent of rough trade,” Jesse tells Kit as they get out of the car.

“How does he fit in with her church crowd?”

“She’s saving him. They love a lost sheep. She’s got him going to Sunday services with her. He’s in the choir. I’ve no idea what her poker-straight friends think of him. It’s kind of cute in a way, if anything about my mother can be cute. It’s like her little rebellion.”

Darrell is fixing something under the sink when they come in—his bony, blue-jeaned hips and legs and silver-toed, snakeskin boots sticking out from the black cave of open cabinet. Jesse’s mother is coming up the steps from the basement with warm khakis and a striped polo shirt, fresh from the Ironrite.

“I just pressed these up for you,” she tells William. “Let’s go upstairs and put them on. There’s going to be a party.”

“Party down!” William says in an amazingly black voice, snapping his fingers in a jivey way.

“‘Soul Train,’ ’’Jesse’s mother says by way of explaining William and then, by way of explaining Darrell, “He’s putting in a new catch pipe for me. The old one’s rusted clear through.”

Work grunts come from the black hole, and then Darrell emerges with a wrench and a battered hunk of pipe. He unfolds himself like a card table into a stooped position and massages the small of his back with the wrench. He’s wearing a thin, white, sweated-through sleeveless undershirt, which reveals a tattoo on his upper arm, a rubber stamp picture of a woman in bell-bottom slacks, her hair piled on top of her head. “Cora,” according to her caption. Jesse smiles and tries hard not to imagine her mother in bed with Darrell, but she’s like a person in the psychology experiment asked not to think of a white bear. She tries to keep at least a sheet over her mother and Darrell, and Cora.

“Ladies,” he says. The way he pronounces it, the word ends in
eeeez.
He bows a little, as though asking them to dance. “Jesse, I haven’t had the pleasure, and this must be the ac-tress.” Darrell’s approach is what goes for pure charm and sophistication at the Blue Light, and would probably get him arrested in New York. Jesse can see, though, that underneath this smooth talking, he’s a little shy in the presence of celebrity. He pats down the back of his hair with a catlike motion.

“My daughters watch your show. Glued to the set when I get up.” This says something about Darrell’s schedule; the show is on at three in the afternoon. “They all want to be nurses, like you.”

“I guess I didn’t know you had kids,” Jesse says.

“A few. Here and there,” Darrell says, flipping his fingers in the air. “And a few more that thinks they got claims. Nothing that’d hold up in court, though.”

Jesse can tell Kit loves this. Of course, it’s not
her
mother.

They all ride over to Hallie’s in the van. Darrell drives and Jesse’s mother sits next to him in a matching velour bucket seat. They hold hands on the shift knob. William tries out one of the bunks along the side in the back while Jesse and Kit face each other in little swivel chairs across the poker table in the center.

“Have a Coke, go ahead, or a Seven-Up,” Darrell offers over his shoulder, but no one makes a move. He taps a cassette into the dashboard tape deck and suddenly the van is wall-to-wall with Merle Haggard rolling out “Looking for a Place to Fall Apart.”

Kit lowers her eyelids and says in a low voice to Jesse, “Come here often?”

By the time the party gets going, it’s the hottest part of the afternoon on the hottest day of this very hot—even for Missouri—summer. There are box fans pulled out on extension cords, blocks of ice set in front of them. They don’t even make a dent in the heat, or in the deadness of the air.

There are maybe fifty people in Hallie’s backyard, and following the custom in these parts, enough food for twice that many. The long row of end-to-end tables are jammed with bowls of salads—three-bean and slaw and sour cream-cucumber. German potato salad. A plate filled with squares of frozen pineapple-cherry salad, already in serious meltdown. Casseroles on trivets—lima bean and tomato, scalloped potatoes and twice-baked potatoes and potatoes Anna. A platter of pea puffs. Three kinds of fried chicken. A large cutting board stacked with barbecued ribs. Desserts alone take up a third of the space. Rhubarb and blueberry and apple pies. Raspberry cobbler. A freezer tub of peach ice cream set in a washtub of shaved ice. A bread roll. Two chocolate cakes. One is plain, the other is frosted with “Happy 65 Frances!” across the top. To Jesse’s knowledge, no one has ever called her mother Fran.

Jesse looks around for Hallie, but can’t find her, then gets pressed into standing by Darrell and her mother at the head of the buffet so they can greet everyone. Some of the guests are relatives—Jesse’s mother’s brothers and her father’s twin sisters and their children and grandchildren. Some are neighbors, others are teachers from the high school, still others are her mother’s students from classes gone by. Jesse wells up with love or something for all of them, wilting a little in their best clothes. They are presents in themselves, as much as the wrapped boxes they bring into the yard along with their covered dishes.

It’s hard to imagine this party occurring in New York. Jesse, having slipped out through the gate in the heavy fence surrounding this place, has shut herself away from this experience. In New York, a bunch of friends might get together and celebrate something one of them has done, but this party today is celebrating someone simply for having stayed and endured somewhere long enough to accrue affection slowly, like passbook interest. Even though she has flunked probably a third of the guests in this backyard today for not being able to write a topic sentence.

“Everybody loves your mama,” Darrell informs Jesse, and she immediately wonders if this is meant as chastisement, if her mother has talked with him about the strain in their relations. But when he punctuates the statement by pulling Frances under the folded wing of his arm and kissing her at the temple, where her hair has thinned out over the years, Jesse sees the remark is pure pride, in her mother, and in himself for his consumer savvy at having picked such a plum.

Jesse just nods and smiles. She doesn’t know quite how to talk with Darrell yet. The two of them haven’t yet found the grooves they’ll fit in, the small set of running jokes and nonsensitive issues for teasing, which she can already see will come to them with time.

“I’ve never forgotten
Evangeline
Bob Weeks is now telling Jesse’s mother as he stands, shy as a freshman, shifting from foot to foot in front of her although he’s in his midforties now and owns the Buick dealership. (“Save a Week’s Pay at Weeks’.”)

Jesse’s mother nods and smiles in confusion until she realizes he’s not talking about a classmate, but about the poem.