Say You're Sorry (10 page)

“Honey, I been thinking about what I said about Jesse and that girl, his wife, uh…”

“Lily,” Loubella said.

“That’s right, Lily, and then I was thinking about you and Isaac. You did say—” And then she stopped. “Jesus Christ, Loubella, what
is
that smell?”

Loubella settled herself back at the table and plopped down the can she was still holding, planted it on the floor.

“Gas,” she answered.

Blanche jumped up, holding a hand to her breast. “The line’s busted!” She reached for Loubella’s arm. “Come on, honey, we got to get out of here!”

Loubella smiled at her as serenely as if she’d just gotten up off her knees from prayer and knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that her supplication had been answered.

Blanche saw that and suddenly her blood ran cold.

Well, forget Loubella. She was getting out of here. She pushed past her to the back door and jerked at it. It didn’t open. She jerked again. “The door’s locked!” she screamed.

Already she was hysterical. This was better than Loubella had even dreamed. She just kept on watching as if Blanche were a picture show, a movie she had waited a long time to see.

“Aren’t you going to do something? You just going to sit there?” Blanche’s voice shrilled with terror and disbelief.

Of course, Blanche had always thought that nothing very bad was going to happen to her, and up until now, she’d been right.

As if in answer, though without saying a word, Loubella stood, picked up the gasoline can, which until now Blanche hadn’t spotted, and heaved it toward her, splattering Blanche’s baby-blue dress.

Blanche screamed. She stood in one place with her hands in fists atop her head and screamed. You would have thought she could already feel the flames.

“
What
are you doing?”

“What does it look like, Blanche?” Loubella’s words were slow and calm. “I’m killing you. Actually, I’m killing us both.” And with that she reached over into a cabinet drawer and pulled out a revolver and placed it before her among the violet-sprigged china and the near-empty bottle of bourbon and the remains of birthday cake. The gun didn’t look very much at home.

Blanche was jumping around now as if a fire were licking at her underpants. She whirled and raced out of the room. Loubella could hear her battering at the front door.

“It ain’t no use, Blanche,” she called. “The doors are locked, and Isaac put bars on the windows last year. You might as well come on back in here.”

Blanche blundered around a while longer before she did as she was told.

She was whimpering. Big tears were rolling down her face. “No, no, no,” she whispered over and over.

“You think you can always get your own way, don’t you, Miss Blanche? Well, this time you can’t.”

“Why?” Blanche wailed.

“Why what?”

“Why are you doing this to me?”

“Why, Blanche, I can’t believe you don’t know how
much
I hate your guts.”

Blanche reeled around the room, scrabbling at the things on the kitchen cabinet, grabbed a dishtowel, and dabbed at the front of her dress.

“Don’t worry about it being stained, honey. Ain’t nothing of it going to be left.”

Blanche began to scream again. Someone would hear her. Surely someone would.

But it was the night of July Fourth. Hardly anyone was home. And those who were, were mostly drunk. Besides, nobody ever paid much attention to a woman screaming in this neighborhood. They figured whoever she was she was getting what she deserved, and if she didn’t, she either ought to get the hell out or pick up a skillet and show the man what for.

“I didn’t mean any of it, Loubella, I’m sorry.” And she started to cry again, not paying any attention to her dripping nose. “I was gonna tell you tonight, just a while ago, that if I had to do it all over, I’d do it different, I swear.”

“That may be true, but those years are already long gone.”

“Oh, Loubella.” Blanche fell to her knees, scratching on the floor at Loubella’s feet. “Please, don’t do this.”

“Remember when you baptized me in the river?” asked Loubella in a faraway, dreamy voice.

“Yes.” Blanche was sobbing, her face buried in Loubella’s knees.

“Remember how you prayed that if we drowned, the Baby Jesus would take us straight to heaven with no stops in between?”

“Yes.” Blanche’s answer was muffled. But in it was just a whisper of hope. Maybe if Loubella could remember those days, when Blanche had been kind, she could find a bit of mercy in her heart.

“Remember how you poured the water over our heads with that old broken cup?”

Blanche nodded. And with that she felt liquid pour all over her hair, dribble down her neck.

But it wasn’t river water. It was gasoline—high test.

Blanche jumped up and screamed. And screamed. And screamed. She couldn’t stop now. Liquid ran down her legs too. Gasoline and urine mixed together, for Blanche had completely lost control of herself.

“You never should have done what you did, Blanche. Parnell may have loved me, but he married you. He would have given you anything on earth you wanted.”

“I know. I know,” Blanche moaned.

“He was too good for you, bitch. You know, you’re the one who was the whore. I did it ’cause I had to. You did it ’cause you liked it. ’Cause you wanted
everything
. You always was a greedy gut, even as a girl. ‘That’s
mine
,’ you’d say. Licking a biscuit so nobody else would touch it. ‘
Mine
,’ no matter what.”

Blanche kept on moaning. She had stopped twitching around the room and had fallen back in her chair as if she’d returned for another cup of coffee, another drink, except that her head was down on the table buried in her arms, and the liquid running down her face was a mixture of gasoline and tears.

“And Parnell was yours. But those years you took from me—those eleven years, six months, and nine days—that quarter of my life I spent in jail, those wasn’t yours to take.
Those
were
mine.
”

“I know. I know.”

“Say you’re sorry, Blanche.” Loubella’s voice was very soft and very cold.

Blanche’s head snapped up.

“I
am
sorry.”

“But not as sorry as you’re gonna be.”

At that, Loubella reached into her wrapper pocket and pulled out a box of wooden kitchen matches. She struck one and dropped it. The floor burst into licking tongues of red and yellow.

In that moment, Blanche saw her chance. Quick as a snake, her hand grabbed the revolver sitting on the table and she fired it without thinking, striking Loubella in the breast.

Loubella reeled backward. Laughter poured from her throat while crimson pumped from a hole in the pale pink wrapper, from right near the spot where her cancer was now cheated from its slower march toward death.

“Thank you, Blanche,” Loubella whispered, and even as she died, she struck and dropped another match.

It was then that Blanche realized, too late, far too late, that she had shot the wrong person. She should have shot herself. For a bullet through the brain was much quicker—why, it hardly compared to burning to death.

The gas can exploded then, and flames engulfed her dress, her hair, her face.

She reached one twisting hand toward the revolver, where she’d dropped it on the table. Maybe it still wasn’t too late. But it was. For Loubella had loaded only one bullet in the chamber. She’d known that whether she fired it or Blanche did, one was all she’d want or need.

The curtains were on fire now, the rugs, the sofa, the bed, the walls, the floor. And in the midst of it, caroming from one small room to another, from door to window to door, was the fireball that was Blanche. That didn’t last very long, though. Soon she dropped and writhed, white teeth showing and glimmers of bone, as beautiful Blanche, blackened like a redfish, fried and crisped and barbecued to a turn, just a little before midnight on this evening of July the Fourth.

Wish You Were Here

Ask Lydia Soniat what she hated most about summer vacation. Ask her the last day of July while she was packing the car. She’d push her damp dark curls off her pretty face—even prettier than she was twenty years earlier as a debutante and Queen of Mardi Gras—kick a tire of her husband Clay’s Mercedes, and drawl, This son of a bitch, I
think
.

It wasn’t the car, of course. A four-door top-of-the-line dark green 560 SEL, one in a line of perennially new sedans Clay ordered from Tar Heel Import Motors in downtown Raleigh as if he were renewing a magazine subscription. Though, in truth, she much preferred the little blue Mustang convertible she’d had for fifteen years—ten years before Dr. Clay Prescott, a very handsome (and successful) nutritionist visiting New Orleans for a medical meeting, had first had her. In the garden shed in the midst of a cocktail party at Dr. Taliferro’s big old house in the Garden District, after far too many Salty Dogs.

No, it wasn’t the car. What she hated was the packing. Every summer Clay’s list of essentials grew longer and longer. Now dressed in white tennis shorts, she stood glaring at this year’s list, her lean strong legs planted wide in their driveway as if to prevent her from being bowled over.

And every year at the end of August as she repacked the car for the drive back to Raleigh, which she’d
never
be able to call home, she asked the same question: Clay, why don’t we just leave all this stuff down here?

Down where? he’d counter in that monotone he adopted when he really wanted to be a pain in the butt, which was often.

Down here in Hilton Head where your mother has rented us a place each August for the past five years. Down here in the Orange County of the South, where you have an orgasm every time you face off three other Mercedes at a four-way stop. Down here in the middle of the Rolex, tennis bracelet, and yacht club wars.

But where would we leave it, he’d drone in the same monotone, ignoring her sarcasm. We’ve taken a different place each year. (He didn’t add, Always trading up. That was a given.)

At your mother’s, Lydia would finally scream. At your mother’s goddamned wedding cake of a house in historic little old Beaufort, half an hour from the beach. The one you bought for her, restored for her, keep up for her so the two of you can pretend she’s Southern gentry instead of a retired schoolteacher. Leave this crap in one of those goddamned guest rooms whose door she’s never darkened.

Oh, no. Clay couldn’t impose on Mother.

But with her…. “Darlin’,” he’d started up just last week. When Clay wanted something he got more Southern, reminding Lydia of the Yankee actresses in
Steel Magnolias
. It was enough to make your skin crawl. “Darlin’, you don’t mind getting our things together, do you, just this once more? I’m so busy at the clinic….” Then he’d trailed off.

She sat now atop her one large suitcase and stared at our things, thinking how if she did it right this time, she could squeeze in her paints and canvases instead of scratching around for new supplies down there. Also thinking about Bali. She really liked the idea of Bali. The beautiful masks. The dances. The Balinese were all artists. Or Borneo. And she wasn’t too old yet to go trekking in Nepal. Sweat trickled between her breasts inside her sports bra.

“You don’t get over in the shade, you gonna give yourself sunstroke.” That was Susan, her next-door neighbor, tennis partner, and best friend.

Best friend in Raleigh, that is. Raleigh–Durham–Chapel Hill, the famed Research Triangle, where Clay had dragged her off to from New Orleans. Home of the Prescott Clinic, his wonderfully successful (until recently) fat farm.

“Don’t talk to me like I’m some idjit,” Lydia said to Susan who stood next to her now, holding up one small square hand to block the blistering sun.

Susan saying, “I don’t know why you don’t get Mattie to do this. Or at least stay in the garage.”

“I have more respect for my help. Besides, who else could ever figure this mess out? And I have to spread it out before I can fit it all in—it’s like a goddamned jigsaw puzzle.”

Susan kicked a carton with the toe of her tennis shoe. “I see you’re taking the veggies.”

“Oh, yes. The no-sugar, no-salt, no-fat, no-taste canned carrots, peas, corn, and spinach. As if the vegetable stands on the island won’t be overflowing with corn and tomatoes.”

“Tomatoes! See, I knew there was something you liked about it down there. Of course, I always thought you were crazy—whining about having to leave Raleigh in this heat and spend August lying around at the beach. Watching those strong young lifeguards.” Susan shivered in her little white tennis dress at the very thought.

“I tell you what. You pack up this car, drive all day nonstop, spend a month of afternoons waiting for Clay to finish up on the golf course and come home and entertain Mother Prescott who always ‘drops by’ just when my painting gets going. You do that and I’ll stay home and screw Robert.”

Susan giggled. “You’d hate screwing Robert.”

“How do you know?”

“Because it’s boring.”

“Honey, it all loses its shine after awhile. Even with Moby Dick. Though, I must say, occasionally he still—” And then she stared off, chewing on her bottom lip like it tasted good.