Carolina Moon (19 page)

“We have good radio,” Barry said. “We
do
have good radio.” He got red in the face and looked real agitated. I mean, that is what the clients, who now consist of Barry, Ruthie Crow, and a seventeen-year-old boy from the halfway facility, who Quee gave the Smoke-Out Fellowship to, have in common. They are all real agitated and snippy. Quee says the lack of nicotine going to the brain causes this reaction. When they get snippy, she sends them out on the back porch to squeeze out cotton batting that she has soaked in wet ashes. She makes them sing: “I’m gonna wash that soot right outa my lungs.” Then she makes them hold and smell raw beef liver as a way of making them consider their internal organs. That poor seventeen-year-old that she has taken into the clinic most recently (free of charge, too!) spends all of his time out there. From the looks of him and that design of a skull shaved on the back of his head, I’d say that smoking is probably the least of his problems. Ruthie Crow stands out there with him a lot of the time because she has become obsessed with finding the best way to describe his skin color. When she held out her little pad where she had written “brown like the suede coat on the cover of the Bloomingdale’s catalog” and asked if he wanted to see what she had so far, he hitched up his long raveling shorts and asked if she wanted to see what
he
had. Quee said that he is a good boy, that she has known him for years; she took him to see the ocean when he was in the first grade and that they have been friends ever since, especially
when his mama who was raising him ran off and left him with some relatives who cared about as much for him as they did one of the cats that stayed up under their old lean-to house. Quee said it was no wonder that he had tried his hand at abusing some substances.

Lord, don’t I know
that
story. Nobody could’ve ever lived in the marriage I was in and
not
have abused something. Anyway, it’s clear that Barry is a bit of an abuser of wine and peanut butter on Saltines. He is forever spewing crackers and licking those sticky fingers. Quee got herself some of those skinny mirrors like they have at some of the department stores and like I’ve heard they use at some of these posh girl schools where these girls try to see who can come the closest to starving herself. I’m being facetious, of course, for those listeners who are
not
informed about bulimia and anorexia. Bulimia is the one I find most disgusting. These folks eat and eat like there’s no tomorrow and then they go and vomit it all back up. We suspect Ruthie Crow of this particular malady, though in four days now I have not smelled vomit on her once, not to mention that I am somebody people just naturally like to tell about their sicknesses. My ex had a friend, a fat divorced hypochondriac sort, who used to give me reports on this virus or that. I called his phone calls the vomit-diarrhea report. He would tell me exactly how many times he had had diarrhea and exactly how many times he vomited and what was in it. I think he thought that I surely must have some kind of special insight into the appearance. Anyway, that old Barry just wouldn’t let it rest and kept right on talking; I’ll do my best to re-create his exact words.

“We get public radio, too, you know,” Barry said. “And I get letters all the time about my show.”

“Oh, I’ve heard your show is wonderful,” I lied. “I’ve heard that you are truly brilliant with the top news stories.”

“He is,” Alicia adds.

“Well, thanks.” He finally nods and sits back, relaxes. If one of these guinea pigs drops dead with a heart attack, Quee will get me for sure.

“Oh my, yes, I didn’t mean to imply otherwise. You know I just know that Alicia here is hurting, and so it was natural of me to bad-mouth her husband to make her feel better.” I had their full attention then. “I mean, haven’t we all said something about a friend’s partner while she was fussing, to make her feel better?” They nodded yes, and then of course I had to go and finish out the story, like about how many people then later find themselves without a friend when there’s a reunion, and then the friend remembers what you said.

“Well, I won’t do that to you,” Alicia said then and patted Barry’s greasy foot one last time before slipping it back into the slipper socks that Quee has everybody wearing. They are white tube socks but she has colored in the toe with black permanent marker so that they look like stubbed-out cigarettes. “I mean, you’re absolutely right. People say awful things about Jones. I say awful things about Jones.” Her eyes got all wide and glassy, like she might burst into tears any second. “The truth is that he’s an awful person and probably, probably . . .” She glanced out in the hallway where Taylor was playing with a little fire truck. “Well, I’m sure he’s off with someone. Either that or somebody’s husband finally caught and killed him.”

“God.” Barry took this as a personal threat and pulled his robe a little bit tighter, crossed his legs. “Do you really think that?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised.” Alicia looked at me then and it was like every muscle in her face relaxed. “I’m glad you think of me as a friend. Certainly Quee is my friend, but over the years I quit having friends my age because they either hated my husband or they slept with him, sometimes both.”

“Is this something you’d like to talk about?” I asked her, mainly
because I’m in such a habit of doing that these days, and she said that, yes, she thought she would, only not right this minute, maybe later.

“It’s Barry’s turn,” she said and stood to go out in the hall. “Besides, Ruthie is waiting to get her facial and head massage.” When she left, I realized that I hadn’t had any girlfriends in a long while either. It sure wasn’t because they would have wanted my husband. If they had, then I wouldn’t have wanted them for friends! No sir, I was ashamed for them to see how a lively and smart person like myself had been reduced to a substance-abusing space ranger. Sooner or later a friend would say, “But
why
did you marry him?” and the honest-to-God truth was that I had no idea.

“Where were we now, Barry?” I asked and he reminded me that we were discussing dream therapy. Well, he was no help at all, said he couldn’t remember a single dream, and I was furious about that. I mean, Ruthie Crow had dreamed that she went to Yellowstone National Park to see Old Faithful.

“That’s it,” she’d said.

“Well that’s a shitload,” I’d told her and then resumed my professional demeanor. “Listen to this. I know you watch TV late in the day, because I hear it turned way down low. What’s more you watch cartoons. Yogi Bear, Jellystone, Yellowstone? Then we get to Old Faithful. This is either sexual, which I don’t have to explain, and it refers to your constant man searching OR”—I didn’t pause for a beat because I could tell she was mad that I said she was
looking
for a man—“it has to do with your ever faithful body and your own efforts to control what goes in and what comes out of it.”

“What do you mean?” she asked and narrowed her eyes.

“You tell me.”

“I know what you think,” she said.

“And?” I waited, tapping my pencil until she broke down and sobbed. Bingo. I should have been a lawyer.

But with Barry. No dreams. Here I was, dying to spout off all that I had taken in from my reading. I mean, if he dreamed of water, birth, or death, or sex, I’d know what to say. But nothing. So I used our dream time instead to try and find out what I could about Alicia’s husband. Barry had been torn up over Jones Jameson for years. There was a part of him that so admired his handsome face and firmly toned physique; he thought Jones Jameson was such a quick wit and certainly had a vocabulary that outdid everybody down at the radio station.

“But,” he finally said and looked down at his stomach roll.

“Yes?” I used my most sensitively controlled voice. “Please go on, Barry.”

“He never really wanted to be my friend, you know?” Barry looked up now and his mouth was quivering. “Wanda and I had them over for dinner at least twice, and they never asked us back. I don’t blame little Alicia for this, of course, I mean he tells everybody down at the station that he makes all the decisions in his house. I could tell he didn’t think I was worthy of his friendship.”

“How?” I asked, even though I was sitting there thinking how sitting here watching this pitiful plump man cry was about the hardest thing I’d ever done, especially when right outside my window I could see the handyman working on the deck of the new “fitness room,” which is, in fact, a little prefab outbuilding where Quee is going to have two stationary bikes, a treadmill, and a NordicTrack, all of which she has already ordered. He saw me in there and kept looking and grinning, shaking his head like what
he
was doing was somehow better than what I was doing. That ill-kempt dog of his was right there
at his feet. His feet were in black Converse high-tops (no socks, laces loose and loopy), and he was wearing a pair of old faded-out nylon beach britches, like were in style about a century ago.

“He never looked at me when I was talking,” Barry said, and I realized that I wasn’t looking at him either. I mean, can you blame me? It was hard to, especially when that idiot was out there showing off, first slamming his thumb with the hammer and then filling his mouth with nails like that was something new. “He never asked me what was going on in MY life. It was like he thought nothing could go on in my life. He treated me like I might’ve been one of the women instead of a man just like him.” Barry paused and sighed. “Well, not just like him, but I am a man!”

“Yes, you are.”

“I wanted him to say to me, ‘Barry you are truly a man,’ but he never did it.” Barry leaned forward and put his hands up to his face and while he was that way I waved my fingers at the handyman, who looked surprised that I did that.

“How did that make you feel, Barry?”

“I got to where I hated him.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Barry stood and paced around with just that towel tied around him and the handyman brushed his two fingers in a
shame on you
. He took the nails from his mouth and made a face like “ooohhh-hhhhh.” “Are you a real therapist?”

“Of course I am.”

“Well, then you’ll be able to appreciate this.”

“Okay.” My palms got all sweaty, and I wasn’t sure if it was because my self-education was about to be tested or because of the shape of Tom Lowe’s mouth making that “ooohhh” sound.

“I wanted to kill the son of a bitch!” Barry sat down in the
La-Z-Boy and swiveled himself toward the wall. “I hated him. I kept thinking, I’m a hell of a lot better than that guy. I kept thinking, so why is
he
the big disk jockey and I’m not? I kept wishing that something would happen to him. . . .”

“Yes?”

“Well, so now it’s starting to look like something has.” Barry looked up, all red-eyed. “Do you think I made it happen?”

“The question, dear Barry,” I said and watched Tom Lowe pull off his T-shirt and drop it onto a bush. His back is very lean and tan. There was a stripe of white ringing his hips where his shorts were falling a little lower than they should, but what was the truth was that I liked them hanging down that way. “Do
you
think you made it happen?”

“I think it’s possible,” he said, and then we wrapped up therapy, and I wanted to lean out the window to say that I was
not
amused by the floor show, just in case he thought I might be. I mean, good God, where does he even do laundry? This place where he lives, well, it must be infested and awful. All those dogs and thus, fleas and lice and probably some field mice and an occasional dead possum. I was thinking of all this and trying to convince myself that there was nothing whatsoever appealing about this yard man out my window. I did that for about the next hour or so while I was writing up all of my notes. Now I’m here, in my room, talking to you and looking out the window where he is
still
down there, working away. Alicia has left for the day and all that’s left for Quee and me to do is what we jokingly call “vespers,” where everybody gets to drink (except the youngster of course) and talk about their addiction to nicotine. Speaking of which, the handyman is puffing away this very instant. Listen to this; first I gotta raise the window:

Hey, you.

Are you talking to me?

Of course.

Yeah?

When are you gonna give up that habit?

When I get ready. When are you gonna give up your habit?

Which is?

Entertaining married men in their towels.

I’m a professional.

Yes. That’s what everybody in town is saying.

And who’s everybody?

Everybody.

I
am
a professional.

That’s what I said. It’s just that people aren’t sure what word comes after that one.

Therapist.

Oh. I see.

I’m a good one, too.

Oh, I’m sure you are. Probably as good as your taste in clothes.

Oh, yeah? Well, I can cure you.

Of?

Addiction. I can cure you of smoking, and I can cure you of mooning over somebody who doesn’t even know you’re around. Somebody who doesn’t even know she’s around.

What do you mean?

Oh dear God, why did I just now say that? Wait. Where are you going? I thought you’d let me work on you. You can come to our meeting. You can stay for dinner. Really. Please don’t leave. I was teasing, you know? I don’t know anything about you or anybody in your life. Quee is gonna be furious with me if I’m the reason you’re not finishing that work today. Please.

OH, SHIT. WELL
, let’s pretend you didn’t hear that. I think that’s what you call bombing, screwing up royally. I think that if I analyze this, what I see is that I said those words out of some kind of strange jealousy that I’m feeling for a very sick person who I’ve never even met, about a man I really don’t know at all. Lordy, I think that I need some therapy. Tom Lowe’s truck is already out of the drive and heading down the street, his denim jacket there on the banister. I’m feeling like crap now, dear tape recorder whoever. Why did I say such a stupid thing?