Carolina Moon (3 page)

THIS SUNKEN PIECE
of property haunted his childhood as he tried to imagine the house that had once stood. That house was his father’s world, a pirate’s cove, a treasure chest, golden words and a .38 revolver, while fifteen miles away his mother paced the small hallway from her dark bedroom to the front window. His parents’ romance was a story everybody in town knew because it was one Cecil Lowe told so often, his wooing and loving of one Betty Jean Kirkland, a shy sweet girl who was known all over town as the girl whose mother sewed wedding gowns in a fancy shop downtown. Her mother’s mannequin, Betty Jean often stood on a stool up in the window of the store, all dressed up in white shiny cloth while her mother knelt and tucked and pinned the fabric. She was pretty and slight,
like a lovely silver moth
, Cecil once wrote in a poem. The day he arrived in Fulton on his way from the bus station to the only hotel in town, he spotted her there in the window. He walked straight into the store and in perfect tune and pitch, asked the woman at the desk, “How much is that girlie in the window?”

Tom’s mother’s stories were either good or bad. There was no gray area at all. His father
was first
handsome and brilliant and courtly and devoted and
then
despicable and hateful, selfish and cruel. He had been courtly and devoted on that October afternoon he and Tommy kicked through the leaves and entered the brand-new bank building. Everything still smelled of paint and plaster and the rubber backing of the new tan carpet in the offices. They rode the elevator in silence as Tom’s father talked about
real
skyscrapers and the way they are built to sway, built to give in to nature just enough that they can survive. “Not a bad code to adopt,” he said as the doors slid open and
they stepped into the empty, glassed-in space. From here Tom could see the steeples of all the area churches, and he could see the Confederate statue in front of the courthouse. He stared at the cuffs of his father’s pants, still damp from their walk on the beach.

“I’m taking you to all of my favorite spots today,” his father said. “Good view, huh?” His hands were deep in his pockets, and he jingled keys and change as he paced from one end of the room to the other. “Right over there is where I first saw your mother”; he leaned his forehead onto the glass and it was difficult for Tom to discern if he was staring down at Main Street or back into his own eyes. “She was quite the belle of the ball.” He pulled a lighter from his pants and then reached into his shirt pocket for the pack of Lucky Strikes there. “But all did not go as planned.” He walked to the other end of the room and lit his cigarette, his hand cupping the flame as if he were standing in a windstorm. “I come up here and I see before and after. I look at where I first met your mother—the beginning—and I come over here and I see how it all turned”—he breathed in and blew a thin stream of smoke into the glass—“or rather
didn’t
turn out.” Tom walked over and followed his father’s pointed finger, looking through the glass, beyond the parking lot of the First Baptist Church, and right into the side corner of his own house, just one window visible, the rest safely concealed by the privet hedge and the large oak tree.

“You just can’t get away,” he whispered. “You see?”

Now he leaned against the glass, his hands cupped like blinders while the cigarette in his right hand burned dangerously low.

“I’ve been up here at night before and watched your mother sitting there in the window. It’s where she always sat at night and where she still does. I planted that privet hedge. I dug a trench and filled it with water.”

Without turning away, he crushed the cigarette into the windowsill and pointed his finger, squinted his eye as if lining up a scope.

“No sir, Tommy. You will always be accountable for every second of your life. Do something good, and you can use it forever. Do something bad, and it’ll haunt the hell out of you. Your mother can act like I’m not a part of her life, but every night when she sits in that chair and looks out on that privet hedge, every night when I may or may not be watching her, every night when she’s watching
you
, then I’m there.”

It was this memory, the view from the bank building, that is Tom’s last of his father. The only other memory he had was from when he was four, and now he isn’t sure if the memory was real or created. It is true that he was in the grocery store with his mother, and it is true that he saw his father. What he remembers is a tall man stepping from behind a pyramid of apples, green and red and yellow, the old checkered floor littered with pasteboard boxes and crates. He remembers several pieces of fruit rolling and landing in a succession of thuds, as his mother grabbed him by the hand and pulled. “Stay away,” she said through clenched teeth. “Haven’t you done enough by now?”

“No, no I haven’t,” he followed them up and down the aisles, his dress shoes clicking with each step. “He’s my son, too. I want to make it up to him.”

“Good,” she said. “Sell your underwater house for what you paid for it and send him to college some day. Buy him some school clothes and that Matt Dillon doll he talks about nonstop!” She stopped suddenly and pulled Tommy to her, smoothed his hair as if to apologize.

“He’ll go to school.”

“You’re damned right about that.” She froze and put a hand to her mouth and then let it drop to her chest, mouthed an apology to the
woman in the checkout. Her mouth was quivering and her hands shook as she opened her billfold to pay for their food.

“Tommy,” his father had whispered then and held out his hand. In the memory or what he believes to be memory, there is a sense of recognition, the hand reaching for him is safe, welcoming. “I love you,” his father said. “I never meant to hurt you.” Tommy doesn’t remember if he reached back. What he remembers is all the times he tried to reconstruct the memory, tried to chisel an image of Cecil Lowe into his mind. Even after the day at the bank, Tom had clung to the earlier memory, the part where his father said, “I never meant to hurt you.”

And his mother confirmed his memory. Yes, they
had
seen his father in the store, his father
had
told Tommy that he loved him,
had
reached out and tried to get him to move away from his mother’s side. Tom’s mother said, yes, it was true that his father never meant to hurt him at all, and that’s why he chose to stick a gun in his mouth and blow himself away. And who was called to clean up that mess? Who? And all that was in the will was left to Tommy, that’s true. How wonderful. A moth-eaten tuxedo, twenty copies of that godforsaken story, and an underwater lot.

Now his mother never even mentions Cecil Lowe unless Tom brings him up. Her life is church socials and the civic center, where she hands out programs for whatever ballet, school play, or band recital is held. Now the tide is coming in, the water up and foaming over the outline of the master suite.

His own home fifteen miles away is nothing more than a flatbed camper on an empty lot. The camper’s two halves open like wings to form beds on either side, a canvas roof zippers down to the little half door. This is the property his mother gave to him, a lot on which she had dreamed of building the perfect house, but for whatever reason
decided to stay where she was. It’s right in the middle of what is becoming the very nicest neighborhood: curbed and guttered, BMWs and Volvos in every drive, antebellum and Williamsburg, Tudor and contemporary; new houses springing from the earth like plants, growing and spreading to fill in every square inch of space with three-car garages and satellite dishes, swimming pools and tennis courts. The earth is scooped to the side and the grass is trucked in and rolled out, watered like clockwork by the underground sprinklers at every house on the street, skipping, of course, Tom Lowe’s yard and camper.

People want to say something to him. They try to, in what they think are subtle ways. They say things like, “You must be planning some house, Tom,” and he just stares back and smiles. The truth is that he was here first. He was here when there were no streetlights and pavement. He was here when the pine trees were so thick that his camper and the narrow dirt road leading to it were completely hidden. His drive is still dirt, which turns to slick red mud in a hard rain.

His trees are still thick and overgrown, wild blackberries rambling out front where he has recently (in response to the inquisitive neighbors) placed a giant thermometer sign. The sign says: “A home will be built on this site when the necessary money is raised.” He didn’t paint in any figures; he’s not building a house, at least not on this piece of land. His house will be on the beach with cross circulation of sea breeze, a view from every angle. In the meantime he has collected up to two thousand dollars in anonymous “love gifts” (as
charity
donations are called locally), some of which he uses over at Buddy Dog to adopt the biggest and oldest (and thus oftentimes most undesirable) canines to be had and the rest to care for them. He now has quite a collection: two labs and three beagles, several mixed breeds, a greyhound recently retired from a track down in South Carolina, a
springer spaniel (Calico Jack), and a feisty, sometimes ferocious Pomeranian (Anne Bonny)—all named for pirates. All are fixed and all wear Invisible Fence collars, so that when unsuspecting neighbors come up close to peer through his pine trees, they are met by what looks like a band of wild dogs. The biggest dog, Blackbeard, is the same mutt he had when he moved into the camper, the same one who rides around in his truck all day, a collie with bad arthritis who has slept in Tom’s bed without any other invited guests for quite a few years. People act like his lack of a love life is far stranger than that he spends his time walking the boundaries of his underwater property and adopting behavior problem dogs. And that’s how he knows that people have about as much hindsight and insight as those big fake-brick pillars that mark the entrance to his neighborhood. If they did, they would not have to look back far in his life to understand his solitude and his desire to opt for nobody over just anybody. If they did, they might jump on his father’s suicide as an explanation, but they would only have grazed the surface. That’s why he likes doing work for Ms. Purdy, Quee; she knows another part of his life. She knew him when he stood waiting to either win or lose. She knew him when he was a senior in high school and known all over town as TomCat. TomCat Lowe, a name that has stuck and followed him all these years later.

Testing . . . testing. . . . It is early in the morning on June, oh, what the hell, June something, and I am tooling right down Interstate 95 to my new life. I just bought this cheap little recorder at an all-night diner where they had a lot of crap at the checkout. I also bought a rape whistle and a mood ring like I once had when I was in the ninth grade. I could’ve bought some fruit-flavored condoms (if that tells you what kind of place I was in), but I passed. I have taken a vow of celibacy, so relieved as hell to be out of the life that is now four hours behind me in the D.C. area. I plan to tell all on these tapes, my life, my secrets. I mean why not? I’m driving along thinking that that big old meteor or whatever it was that hit Jupiter could just as easily slam into Earth and wipe us all out and wouldn’t I be so sorry if I’d stayed in a miserable life? Wouldn’t I be sorry if I’d spent my days fretting over this calorie or that. Just prior to entering the marriage I’m now leaving, I was driving down this same interstate, and what did I see but a big white horse racing down the side of the road. At first I thought I was hallucinating, and then I thought it was a sign like from Revelation, coming for to carry me home or some such. Of course then I saw this red-faced farmer hauling ass,
with a harness clutched in his hand and a deserted plow out in the middle of a tobacco field. Still, I should’ve taken heed. If a friend had told me that story, I’d have said,
It’s a sign, stay single
.

I’ve always been asked for advice by others. It comes to me naturally, whether I want the position or not. It’s like all I have to do is walk into a room, and within five minutes everybody who’s anybody with a problem has come up and affixed himself to me. I think of myself as a crazy magnet. I say, Step right up, step right up, put on your iron filings suit and get sucked my way. Give me your lost and crazed. Are you on drugs? Are you afraid to come out of the closet? Do you like to tell others every graphic detail of your sex life or intestinal functions? Well then, clearly, I’m the woman you’ve spent your life looking for. The trouble is that I’m so goddamned sick and tired of listening to all your crap that I have decided to set up shop and just talk to myself for a few months since all of you problem types out there just don’t happen to ever have time to
listen
.

If you’re listening to these tapes, then there’s a very good chance that I’m dead. So fine, listen. Sit back and enjoy yourself. My name is Mary Denise Parks, but everybody calls me Denny just like the restaurant. I am thirty-five years old and on my way to Fulton, North Carolina, where I have a job waiting for me. I am going to put my crazy magnet properties to good use and become a therapist. I have never been a therapist; I only took introduction to psych in college, where I majored in recreation. Serious recreation of course. I have spent the past several years going into rest homes and tossing balls of yarn into hands too old to catch and helping the more virile types glue dried beans onto boards in shapes of chickens and sunrises and so on. People say I’m good at what I do. People were crazy about me in Virginia, where I lived as the wife of an academic, an English professor who spent his whole life researching writers who had allergies.
As a result, he spent an enormous amount of time studying the sneeze, what part of the brain controlled it, bright lights, and so on. He couldn’t shut up about that French guy who liked to
watch
others, if you know what I mean, and otherwise stayed corked up in his room his entire life writing one really long book, and then that woman poet from Boston whose name I can’t think of either. He referred to them as “the asthmatics,” which I said sounded like a punk rock band that might be into leather and little face masks, like Dennis Hopper used in
Blue Velvet
. People said my husband must be such an interesting person. Yeah, right, that’s why I felt inclined to take off all of my clothes while watching
Body Heat
in a public theater. William Hurt was so close I could have spit a Raisinet and hit him. I was almost shed of
everything
when the manager of the theater came and asked me to put my clothes back on, and then somebody called my husband to come and get me. He was so mad, his jaw clenched tightly. I faked several sneezes to distract him and went on about my business. I knew I was out of there.