Victory Over Japan (11 page)

I was listening. I was leaning against the portable dishwasher wondering what effect Sandor's coming would have on our diet. A diet's a very delicate thing. You have to keep your momentum going. You have to stick to your routine. Well, it was Mother's beach house, and if she told Sandor he could come there was nothing I could do but meet the plane.

“Who's coming?” Lanier said. “Who's on their way?”

“My cousin, this gorgeous cousin of mine that had a nervous breakdown trying to be a movie star. He used to be a football player before he took up acting. Then he went to California. He's got these beautiful shoulders and he plays a saxophone. Haven't you ever been here when he was here?”

She was pulling on her leotards. We wear them even in the heat. To make us sweat. There are several schools of thought about that. Lanier and I are of the school that says the hotter you get the better. “Let's don't take a pill today if we're going to Pensacola,” she said. “I'm sick of taking them. They make me nervous. They make me talk too much.”

“We have to take them. Ten days. Ten pills. We swore we'd do it. Besides, I'd take cyanide to get this fat off my stomach.” I handed her a pill and a glass of water. “Come on. Just four more days. Go on. Take it. Then we'll do leg raises, then stomach crunches, then we'll run down to the beach and take a swim. You have to look on this as a religious experience, Lanier. Pretend you're the Buddha going on a fast. Or Jesus in the wilderness or something.”

She took it and put it in her mouth and swallowed it. We had gone to a lot of trouble to get that Escatrol. We had begged a young surgeon for weeks, convincing him we wouldn't tell where we got it. Or drink on top of it.

She put down the water glass and heaved a sigh. Lanier's got a lot of guilt. She can even feel guilty about going on a fast. I work on her and work on her but she's still that way. “Okay,” she said. “I want to try standing in the waves for an hour again. I could tell a big difference in my thighs today. I think they look a lot better.” She took the aerobic dance record out of its cover and put it on the turntable. “What's he like, this Sandor?”

“He's sad,” I said. “Beautiful and sad. Even when he plays his saxophone it's always sad music, songs he writes. If you ask him to play anything you know he puts it back in the case. Anyway, he's gorgeous. If worse comes to worse we can always look at him.”

“Let's start on the exercises. I think the pill's taking effect. I'm starting to feel it. I'm going to try to get in my pink denim skirt to wear to Pensacola.” She dropped the needle down on the record and we went into our routine.

“GET THOSE BODIES WORKING,” a woman named Joanie demanded. “LETS SEE SOME ACTION IF YOU WANT ATTRACTION. HE'S NOT GOING TO LOVE YOU IF HE HAS THAT FAT STOMACH TO CONTEND WITH. YOU CANT HIDE BENEATH AN OVERBLOUSE FOREVER. COME ON,” she was getting mean now. “YOU GREW IT. YOU LIFT IT. SQUEEZE IT. SQUEEZE IT LIKE YOU MEAN IT. SQUEEZE IT LIKE YOU OWN IT….”

We bent and stretched, jumped and pulled, turned and squeezed, panted and breathed, groaned and creaked. “STRETCH THOSE OLD TRAPS,” Joanie demanded. “HOW LONG SINCE YOU FELT A GOOD STRETCH IN THE OLD PECS? CRUNCH IT. CRUNCH IT LIKE YOU MEAN IT. FEEL THAT STUFF MELTING. THE FAT'S ON THE FIRE….” We finished up with a hundred jumping jacks and fell back on the floor exhausted.

“Your midriff looks a lot better,” Lanier said. “I swear I can see your ribs.”

“You think so?” I walked over to Momma's gilt picture frame mirror and surveyed my ribs. “Oh, God, if they would only show from the back. If only once more before I died I could see the ribs in my back. The last time was that year I was engaged to Saint-John Royals. Remember that year? I weighed 114 for five straight months.” I gazed off into a découpage umbrella stand, glorying in the memory. “Maybe I should have married him.”

“I think it's time for us to marry someone,” Lanier said. “I think we're going to have to lower our standards, Diane. He's really gorgeous, your cousin Sandor?”

“Like a god. I don't know why he didn't go over in Hollywood. I guess the sadness showed up on the screen test.”

“What's he sad about?”

“I don't know. It's just how he is. He's always been that way.”

“Maybe we can fix him up,” she said, and laughed her old skit night laugh. Lanier's a riot when she wants to be. “Maybe we can cheer old Sandor up.” She settled her hands on her hips and gazed out the window at the water.

We were in my mother's beach house, a frame house up on stilts, looking out on the Gulf of Mexico at the exact point where the state of Alabama meets the state of Florida. A dark green house with white shutters. White sand stretching as far as the eye can see, clean white dunes and deep green sea and always a breeze even on the hottest day. The Redneck Riviera people call that part of the country now, rednecks and power boats and waterfront developments growing up beside every little stagnant bayou. Baldwin County, Alabama. Black man, don't let the sun go down on you. The natives used to boast there wasn't a black man in the county limits. The white people have these opaque blue eyes. Churches on every corner. A man who boasts he can kill, pluck, cook and eat a chicken in eighty seconds.

Still, I loved it. I'd been going down there all my life. From a time when it was so desolate you had to stop in Mobile for groceries. When we hauled drinking water from behind the Orange Beach post office. When the dolphins still swam by the pier in the mornings, lifting their heads to look at us, rolling and playing, touching and caressing, nudging each other with their snouts. “Why would you need to read a book about dolphins to know how smart they are?” my mother said to me one day. “Anybody that ever saw one would figure that out.”

Lanier and I finished up our morning routine and dressed and got into the car. We had a cooler with some Tabs and carrot sticks and shredded cabbage and one small apple apiece. Not that we were hungry. Escatrol takes care of being hungry.

We were feeling good. Lanier had made it into the pink skirt and I was wearing a yellow playsuit,
with a belt
. We stopped at a gift shop in Gulf Shores and found some cards to send to Jackson and had our picture taken together in a three-for-a-dollar photograph machine. We always did that when we came to the coast. It was part of our history. Then we went into the Gulf Shores doughnut shop to look at the buckets of lemon filling that were always sitting on the floor with flies all over them and the tops half off. Aversion therapy. Lanier's the one that thought that up. It still worked. They hadn't changed management and cleaned it up.

At the drugstore Lanier bought a book about Anita Bryant's private life and read it out loud to me all the way to Pensacola, putting in the stuff the writer left out. “Anita Bryant was always very close to her father, Big Jack Bryant,” the book would say. “Oh, Big Jack, show me again that big black secret thing of yours,” Lanier would add. We thought it was hilarious. We laughed all the way to Pensacola. Escatrol, queen of prescription drugs.

Sandor looked wonderful getting off the plane. He didn't look like he'd had a nervous breakdown. He didn't even look as sad as usual. He had on a beige shirt with epaulets, made of some soft material. And tan slacks with no belt. This Greek god kind of blond hair, with natural streaks. I couldn't believe I'd been sorry a minute that he was coming. Lanier went crazy when she saw him. You could hear her pull her stomach in.

She moved right in. “You want an Escatrol,” she said. We were waiting for the luggage. She'd forgotten I was there. “Diane and I have some Escatrol. We got it from a doctor. You want one? You can have one if you want it.” “Sure,” he said. “Where are they?” She took the bottle out of her purse. We'd been taking turns keeping them. She undid the safety cap, took out a green and white capsule and held it out to him. “Happy landings,” she said. They laughed like old buddies. Sandor took the pill from her and walked off toward the water fountain.

“Let's have a party,'' he said when he got back. “Where do you want to start?”

We started at this place called the Quarter, modeled on the French Quarter in New Orleans. Six different bars under one roof. Every bar has a different kind of music, juke boxes in the daytime, live bands at night. Country music in one place, jazz guitar in the next, rock and roll, new wave. One even has old fifties stuff, for old people, so they can hear their old songs.

It was four in the afternoon when we got there. Everything just getting started for the night. The bartenders changing shifts, people wiping off the tables, straightening chairs, dusting glasses. We started in a part called the Seven Sailors. Fishnets on the wall and stuffed monkeys and parrots hanging from the nets and a juke box with Greek music. Sandor ordered a double gin martini and Lanier ordered wine and somehow or other I decided on a Salty Dog. Tequila on top of dexadrine is sort of like you took sunlight and squeezed it through a cylinder so what comes out the other end is the size of a thread. The thread is how you feel for about thirty minutes. After that, well, there's good and bad in everything. You have to take your chances, make your choices. Not that we were making the right ones that day. Only I'm not going to start feeling guilty about it. Even with what happened next. Even if I'll see him standing in that door holding a gun forever. Even if I'll feel his hands on my arms till the day I die.

***

We settled down at a table with our drinks. “I heard you had a nervous breakdown,” I said, moving my chair over close to Sandor's.

“Who told you that?” he said.

“Momma said Aunt Treena said so. Well, did you have one or not?”

“No, I didn't have a nervous breakdown. I checked into a hospital because Hollywood was driving me crazy. I needed to think things over. It was a good rest. I decided the best thing to do was come on home and settle down and get a regular job. So here I am.” He smiled that gorgeous smile and took a big drink of his martini. “That's dynamite speed. Where did you get it? You can't get stuff like that even on the Coast.”

“It's for a diet,” I said. “We had to take the prescription to five drugstores to get it filled. They don't even stock it anymore. Lanier and I are going to be so thin when we get back to Jackson no one will even know us. What kind of job are you going to get?”

“I don't know. Whatever they'll let me do. Selling cars or construction work. Maybe real estate. I'm not worried. I'll think of something. Something'll turn up.”

“Of course you're worried,” I said. “You're worried sick. You've wasted your youth trying to be a movie star and now you haven't got a profession. Don't try to pretend you aren't worried about that, Sandor.”

“I guess you're right,” he said. “I guess I'm more worried than I realize.”

“Come up to Jackson where we are,” Lanier said. “There's always work around the legislature. Senator Huddleston will find you something.”

“That's an idea,” he said. “Maybe I'll drive up with you when you leave.” He signaled the waiter and we had another round of drinks. Then I got an idea. “Let's rent a hotel room and park the car and take taxis and go on and get good and drunk,” I said. “Let's celebrate Sandor returning to Dixie. Back in the fold. No Tails. That's what we called Sandor when he was little, Lanier. One summer we were all at the beach house and he discovered he didn't have a tail. He was just a little boy. He'd go around all summer pointing out his back end to people. No tails, he'd say. No tails.”

“That's the trouble with getting drunk with your cousins,” Sandor said. “They tell everything you did. We called Diane the Duchess because she always tried to boss everyone around.”

“She's still that way,” Lanier said. Now they had that in common. I had tried to boss them both around. She leaned against his arm. Sandor was leaning back. They were leaning on each other. But what about me? Who was I supposed to lean on?

We found a taxi and went over to the old Piedmont Hotel and got a room and took a shower and put our clothes back on and went out and got drunker. On the way out of the room I took one of the Escatrol capsules and opened it up on a piece of hotel stationery and we took turns licking up the little green and yellow balls with our tongues. “Why not,” I said to Sandor. It was an old thing my cousins and I like to say when we're really going to get in trouble. “Whyyyyyyy not,” he answered.

Around ten that night we ended up at a gay bar called the Monkey's Paw listening to a female impersonator named Lady Aurelius. She was singing Barbra Streisand when we came in. People, people who need people. Songs like that. It made me feel like crying. I sat there watching Lady Aurelius mouthing the words of a Barbra Streisand album, missing all my old boyfriends and fiancés. Some day he'll come along, Lady Aurelius was singing now, switching styles. THE MAN I LOVE.

I don't know what came over me. I'm not an exhibitionist. Maybe I was sick of watching Sandor and Lanier lean on each other. Maybe I was under the influence of the Monkey's Paw. All those smiling faces. I got up and walked up on the stage and went over to Lady Aurelius and put my arm around her waist and started helping her sing. I'VE GOT TO BE ME, I was singing. I'VE GOT TO BE ME. I was into it. I moved out in front of her. I took the stage. She didn't seem to mind. She was a very strong looking female impersonator. As tall as my father. I started screaming out new words to the songs.
I've got to be me. No matter what happens. Or how much it hurts anybody. Or whether they like it or not. To hell with it. I've got to be me. I've got to be me
. I was right up to the edge of the stage yelling my head off. Then I started doing my exercise routine. Rolling my arms around in the air, bending from side to side so the audience could see how supple I was. Twisting and shaking and doing the boogie. I looked back at Lady Aurelius. She had stopped smiling. She was standing very still.