Oral History (9781101565612) (36 page)

The doorbell rang and there she was.

I was still in my bathrobe. Davy, who was about six weeks old at the time and had the worst case of colic you ever saw, was asleep. I never slept at night, it seemed like. I was always so tired with Davy. I had taken a two months' maternity leave from the bank to have him. Anyway I squinched the venetian blinds apart to see who might be ringing my doorbell in the middle of the morning, and looked out there and saw her. I remember it was August, you could see the heat coming up in waves from the cement road in front of my house.

Pearl looked as cool as a cucumber, though. She had on a white frilly dress and white shoes and looked like she was fixing to have her picture taken at Olan Mills. Red lipstick and bubble hair.

It got all over me, the way she looked. I was still wearing Kotex from having Davy. Still bleeding. I had back pains and looked like hell.

She rang the doorbell again.

Finally I opened the door.

“Sally!” Pearl said in the breathy way she'd taken up since she had gone to college and gotten so arty. “I guess you're surprised to see me.”

“I guess I am,” I said.

“Oh, and I've brought the baby a present, where
is
the baby?” Pearl asked, and when I pointed at the bassinet over by the recliner she went over and pulled back his blanket and looked at him.

“Oh, he's so
little!
” she said. “Ooh, look how little he is!”

“He's not but six weeks old,” I said.

“Are you sure his head's OK?” Pearl asked. “I mean it's so pointed and all.”

“That's forceps,” I told her. I got a cigarette and lit it. Pearl was making me nervous.

“Well, is it
normal
?” Pearl said. “To be that pointed?”

“Hell, yeah, it's normal,” I told her. Davy was just adorable. “What's the matter with you?”

Then to my complete shock, Pearl sat down hard in the recliner and started wringing her hands. She looked like she was fixing to cry any minute already—wet eyes shining with tears to come—with Pearl you always felt like there was a nervous breakdown right around the corner anyway, right beneath those slick blue shifting eyes.

“What's the matter?” I asked again.

“I
don't know
,” Pearl said. She looked around and around my house, at the pile of diapers folded and the other pile of diapers not folded on the floor beside the recliner, at Davy in his bassinet, at the picture I'd gotten with Green Stamps and hung up over the couch, at the antimacassars which my husband's mother had crocheted.

I saw my house for the first time through her eyes, I knew what she thought. I was trying so hard then, too. Then I got mad. It made me mad, what I thought Pearl thought.
I don't give a damn
, I said to myself. I put the present she had brought me, still wrapped, on the coffee table in front of the couch. I sat on the couch and lit another cigarette.

We both looked at the present—wrapped in blue, with a bow and a rattle, you know she had them do it at the store—sitting there on the coffee table. Neither one of us said anything. The air conditioner switched on.

Pearl was twisting her hands. Platinum nail polish, that's what she wore—

“What do you want?” I asked.

Pearl took a deep breath. “You may find this hard to believe, Sally,” she said, “but I want us to be friends. I want to talk to you.” She seemed to be making this decision in spite of the way my house looked.

“Why?” I asked. I wasn't going to let her get away with anything.

Davy twisted and sighed in sleep. I knew he'd wake up before long.

“Well, as I said, you may find this hard to believe. But I've always admired you, Sally, and I feel like although we've taken different paths in life, we still have a lot in common.”

Pearl is the only person I ever knew who said things like “paths in life” out loud.

“Such as what?” I said.

“Mama,” Pearl said then, and I jumped like I'd been shot.

It was the only thing she could have said that would have kept me from running her straight out the door.

Pearl took a deep breath. “I'm going to get married,” she said.

“Well good,” I told her. “I guess.”

Pearl looked like she didn't know whether it was good or not.

“I feel kind of funny about it,” she said. “I thought I'd come and ask you . . .” Her voice trailed off to nothing and she licked her red lips. I waited.

“Listen, it seemed to me,” she said, “it always seemed to me when we were girls like you knew some kind of secret I didn't know, I didn't even know what it was
about
,” Pearl said. “You always knew what to do around the house and all. You always knew what you were doing, you always did what you wanted to.” (Now this, as you know, is not true. I didn't know what I was doing any more than anybody else does. I just did what I had to, which goes for most.) Anyway, Pearl went on. “I mean the way you just up and quit school, and the things you did, and the way you ran away to Florida and then how you came back and had Rosy—it was like you always knew what you wanted and you always did it whatever the consequences, and I always admired that, Sally, I wanted to be like that, Sally, I wanted to be like that, I wanted to be
you
in fact and run off to Florida with a disc jockey, but you scared me too which is why I hated you then, although I didn't really, I never really did. I went the other way, you know, as far as I could get from all that. And everything is just so right for me now but I still feel like there's something I missed, something somewhere that you had ahold of.”

Pearl was so upset by then that her language was slipping from the fancy way she'd come to talk, she sounded like a mountain girl again, like me. “I've done my best to better myself, to get away, to have a new life—”

“Listen, Pearl,” I surprised myself by saying. “Honey, there's no new life.” (Now where did that come from? I guess deep down inside I knew that already, in spite of being saved and listening to Mr. Bristol so long ago.)

“What?” Pearl said. “What?” She was all wrought up.

“Forget it,” I said. “Go on.”

“Anyway, I feel like we went about it different ways—me doing what I had to do to get away, and you doing what you had to, but now you're all married, and you have this cute little pointy-headed baby, and that's what I'm fixing to do, too, get married, and as you know it's all I ever wanted”—(HA! I thought, but I held my peace.)—“and now I just don't know. I mean, you had something else there for a while, something wild, you did whatever you wanted and never cared a minute what anybody else thought”—(Is that true? I thought. My problem is, I can't decide, looking back, what is true and what's not.)—“and now you're married, and you have a daughter and a husband and a baby, and you're just like anybody else, and I just thought I'd ask you—”

“What?”
I said.

“How you like it.”

I started laughing so hard I couldn't stop. “Pearl, Pearl,” I said.

“I mean, what else is there?” she said. “Or is there?”

Nobody else would have asked it out loud.

“Listen,” I said. “Who knows?”

Not me, and not then, that's for sure. They say experience is the best teacher, but I'll be damned if I know what it teaches you. I'll be damned if I know.

“Well!” Pearl sat up straight in the recliner and then fell back again like she was having what they used to call a sinking spell. She closed her eyes and let the cool wind from the air conditioner, which she was right in front of, blow over her face.

“It's not like that, is it,” she said without opening her eyes. I didn't even answer. I think she didn't expect me to. “What I keep thinking is that there's something else, you know, something that Mama knew about and never told us, something she was going to tell us when we got old enough, she said that one time, but then she died, and everything that comes up, I think well is this it? Is this it? but the thing is, you never know.”

I smoked another cigarette. Davy whimpered like a puppy in his sleep.

“It's all about love,” Pearl said.

The air-conditioner wind barely moved her hair, she had sprayed it so high and tight.

Davy woke up and started hollering and I changed his diaper and let him nurse. There is something about a baby's pull on your nipple that puts you in mind of a man, but it is entirely different from that—it's different from everything else. And there's a lot of things, like that and what Pearl was saying, you can't explain.

Pearl powdered her face and drew on some new red lips.

“Who is it you're marrying?” I said.

“Earl Bingham, he's an upholsterer in Abingdon, he does the most beautiful work. He's twenty years older than me, he just adores me,” Pearl said. “He just loves me to death.” But she seemed absent-minded, fishing around in her purse.

“There was something else,” she said and then trailed it away. She stood up, smoothed down her skirt. “I'm sorry.” She hugged me suddenly so hard I almost dropped Davy.

“Pearl, Pearl,” I said—and again I surprised myself, I didn't realize what I was fixing to say—“You'd better watch out,” I said.

Pearl hugged me again and left me there in my six-room respectable house on Potter Street near the nylon hose company with Davy and Rosy and Ding-a-ling, doing the best I could. Which wasn't so hot at the time!

I watched through the venetian blinds as she went down the walk on her white high heels and got in her car—pale gray Buick, Pearl was so goddamn tasteful—and left.
Watch out, watch out
, I thought. This is the closest thing to a premonition which I have ever had to the kind of ESP like you see nowadays in the
National Enquirer
. Of course it might of been purely post-partum depression. But the air conditioner clicked up a notch—it was hot that day, as I said—and the way it droned sounded suddenly awful to me, like war planes across the sky.

 

When my husband left me and Roy moved in, some years after that, Pearl called me up on the phone.

“Hello?” I said, kind of frazzled. It had been a snowstorm going on, lines down all over the place, and the phone had been ringing off the hook for Roy who had not had but three or four hours of sleep a night in the whole past week.

“It's me,” she said.

Trust Pearl to say “It's me” and expect you to know who it is.

“Me who?” I asked.

“
Pearl
,” she said.

“Long time no see,” I told her, grinning. I was back to being myself then, from living just that long with Roy. All that time of working so hard and trying so hard and not talking had passed away like a dream.

“I'm sorry about you and your husband,” she said. “Ora Mae told me about it when I called to tell her the news.”

“Well, I'm not sorry,” I said. Then I said, “What news?”

“I'm going to have a baby,” Pearl said, “like you.”

Not like me
, I wanted to scream. Not like me at all, you fool, no one is ever alike, I thought, don't say that.

“Well, that's real nice, Pearl,” I said.

“Why did he leave you?” she asked me with that high strained note in her voice that I knew from before. Obviously she had not heard the whole story. “You had his baby and then he left you,” she said. “Sally, why?”

There was never any way to tell Pearl that there are things you cannot ask about, or things you can't explain. No small talk: that was one of her problems.

“It's a long, long story,” was all I said. “But I'm lots better off, believe me.”

“I thought you had decided—I thought you had made your—” Pearl was crying, I think, but the connection went bad then too and all I could hear was static. I hung up the phone, imagining the long black wires strung out across the snow and all the snowy mountains between my house and hers where she lived with that poor old upholsterer who loved her to death—in a way, I guess, like old Ding-a-ling had loved me, but sometimes that's not enough, and for Pearl I knew already that nothing was ever going to be enough. I thought about the long black wires, and Pearl over there, the night coming on, and Roy out in the middle of it somewhere, working on the power lines. I did not—maybe I should have—call her back. Instead I thought about Roy some more, and ran another load of wash, you know how kids change clothes about five times a day when it snows, and made some potato soup.

 

The next time I saw Pearl was two or three years after
that
, when her little girl Jennifer was, I guess, maybe three, and this time I went myself to see her because Billy had called me up. This is the only part that Roy already knew, and he thinks it's funny and it is, but it isn't really. Billy calling me up was unusual to say the least. Oh, Billy stayed in a kind of distant jittery contact with all of us, I guess, not much more than Christmas cards but
that
at least, better than Lewis Ray. I think Billy just kept in touch so he wouldn't get caught by surprise. Anyway, Billy said that a man from his electrical supply house went over there to put in a chandelier which Pearl and her upholsterer had ordered for their new house, and while he was over there, Pearl came halfway down the stairs wearing nothing but a see-through blue nylon nightie and holding a box of Kleenex, and she sat down right there on the stairs and cried into the Kleenex and wadded them up one by one and threw them down over the banister. The electrician from Billy's company didn't know what he ought to do, as you can imagine. He went on working on the chandelier for a little while, getting more and more nervous, as you can imagine, and then at noon when the upholsterer came in with the little girl, Jennifer, and they started hollering at each other, the electrician packed up his tools and got out of there.