This One and Magic Life Page 3

  “I thought you had to go to the store,” Dolly says.

  “I do. But you, my friend, are wilting. You need a big glass of water and some air-conditioning.”

  “A cool shower would be nice.”

  “Damn, that sounds good. And then you can come help me peel shrimp.”

  “Don’t hold your breath.”

  Kelly pulls into the driveway behind Artie’s house. Dolly sees her mother’s car, her Uncle Hektor’s truck, and a car she doesn’t recognize parked beneath the pecan trees. And suddenly she understands why she had had Uncle Hektor put her out at the park, why she had lingered.

  When she steps out of this car into the shafts of sunlight through the trees, she will have to accept that things are forever changed.

  SIX

  Shifting Gears

  DONNIE SULLIVAN IS SITTING ON THE DUNE BEYOND ARTIE’S house thinking about life and death. He is telling himself that his twin is dead. He is telling himself that he is almost fifty-nine years old. Behind him is the house where he grew up; in front of him is the bay where his parents drowned. A few people still walk the beach picking up fish from the jubilee.

  In his thoughts about life and death, Donnie Sullivan has concluded that everyone will die and that there may or may not be a heaven or hell. What he truly believes is that Artie is over the next dune painting one of the pictures that look so fuzzy and earn her so much money. She is happy doing that. She told him time went away when she was painting, that it was like the world shifted gears.

  Damn, but she drove him crazy. He’d be talking to her about something important like her income tax and realize she wasn’t listening at all but was off in her own world. And then she would turn right around and be totally practical about something. With Artie you never knew what to expect.

  He thinks of the day the boat brought in the bodies of their parents, how he, Artie, and Hektor had watched the men throw the rope to the pier and lift the canvas-covered bodies. It was raining, the heavy mist of Mobile Bay that lingers sometimes after a thunderstorm and slides off everything. The three of them stood watching the yellow bundles, one larger than the other, being lowered from the deck. Had anyone said anything to them while the bodies were lying there or being placed in the ambulance? He can’t remember. There was only Artie turning fiercely toward Hektor and him, her face and hair wet, her fists clenched.

  “It isn’t them,” she said. “You know it can’t be them. We fixed everything.”

  “No, we didn’t,” Hektor sobbed. “We just thought we did, Artie. That’s Mama and that’s Papa.”

  But Donnie had looked into the mist of the bay and had felt a weight lifted from him. What was going to happen had happened.

  God, how long ago that had been. During the night the rain had become a thunderstorm again and he had gotten up to check the windows. In his parents’ room the light was on, and Artie was pulling clothes from the closet, and throwing them into a pile on the floor. He stood watching her, and she saw him watching her.

  I should have gone in and helped her, he thinks now. We should have gotten Hektor up and the three of us should have talked about what had happened. We owed that to each other. He runs his hands through his thinning hair. His scalp feels hot.

  He has never lived in a world without Artie.

  Reese, wizened and black, crosses the yard and sees Donnie thinking.

  “Ha,” he says.

  SEVEN

  Chowchow Pickles

  “I CANNOT UNDERSTAND TO SAVE MY SOUL WHY NEIGHBORS bring food that has to be refrigerated. Can you, Mrs. Randolph?” Mariel Sullivan sits on her haunches before the refrigerator trying to find room for another bowl of shrimp Creole and another squash casserole. “I can’t cram another thing in here.”

  Mrs. Randolph, Artie’s sitter who is staying to help, comes and looks over Mariel’s shoulder. “Half that second shelf is pickles been in there forever. We could just throw them out. Save the jars.”

  “Fine with me.” Mariel begins handing jars to Mrs. Randolph. “Some of this stuff is so old, Donnie’s mother could have put it up.”

  “I didn’t think she did anything like canning.”

  Mariel hesitates. “Oh? I didn’t know you knew her.”

  She rises to her knees and straightens her back. In one hand is chowchow, in the other, pear relish. In the jar of chowchow, clearly as if in a crystal ball, she sees sick Artie gasping out all the family secrets and fat Mrs. Randolph lapping them up like cream. “Murder,” Artie whispers from the pickle jar, her face a white blur.

  “Let me write that down,” Mrs. Randolph says.

  “What?” Mariel says with a start.

  “Let me write down Mrs. Bell brought that squash casserole. What I wish they’d do is put their names on a piece of adhesive tape and stick it to the bottom of the dish. Save a lot of trouble. We started doing that at our church.” Mrs. Randolph takes a list from her pocket and looks for a pencil.

  Mariel shuts the refrigerator and puts the pickles on the counter.

  “Did Artie talk much about Mrs. Sullivan?” she asks hesitantly.

  “Said she was a terrible cook. Didn’t you know her?”

  “Sure. I grew up here in Harlow.” Mariel takes a sliver of ham from a tray and nibbles on it. “When I was a teenager, I’d help out when Mrs. Sullivan had parties.”

  “Folks still talk about what elegant parties she had.”

  “They were elegant. That’s for sure.”

  “Don’t eat with your fingers, dear,” Sarah Sullivan says.

  Mariel sighs and rinses her hands in the kitchen sink while her mother-in-law Sarah reads the cards on the food. “Mississippi mud cake. Artie’s favorite. Be sure to get the thank-you notes in the mail within a week, Mariel.”

  Mariel, who goes to a Jungian analyst once a week, knows Sarah is only a shadow. Sarah, dead over forty years, does not know this. She looks Mariel up and down. “Of course, Artie could always eat anything she wanted and not gain an ounce.”

  “Artie must have taken after her mother. She was gone a lot when I first married Earl and moved here from Selma, but everyone had stories to tell about her. And you know what? Even at the end you could tell how pretty she’d been.” Mrs. Randolph fits another plastic-covered bowl of shrimp Creole into the refrigerator. “There.”

  Mariel looks down at her tan pants and beige shirt. Size ten. Shadow or no shadow, one of Sarah’s favorite things to do is make Mariel feel insecure. Artie had done the same thing.

  “Artie,” Mariel tells Mrs. Randolph, “wasn’t a thing like her mother. She wasn’t like anybody else in the world.”

  Mrs. Randolph closes the refrigerator and smiles. She has not studied Jungian psychology, but the good Lord blessed her with common sense. She can spot jealousy in an instant.

  The back door slams. “I’m here,” Dolly calls. She stands in the wide hall that her grandmother Sarah had designed to pick up every breeze from Mobile Bay. The house smells familiarly of almonds, the potpourri that Artie ordered from California to fill the large Chinese bowl. Almonds. There is no smell of flowers or antiseptic or medicine. Just almonds. Dolly closes her eyes. Sarah, she thinks. Artie. And now me. If I stayed, what would I bring to this house? What would follow me into this house?

  Mariel comes from the kitchen and kisses her. Dolly is five inches taller than her mother and has to lean down.

  “We were scared you might not make that flight,” Mariel says.

  “Made it at the last minute.” The two women check each other out. Beige.

  “I see Uncle Hektor brought in my bags.” Dolly points to the American Tourister and the Merle Norman tote by the stairs.

  “But I have your room at home all ready.”

  “I’m staying here. Where’s Papa?”

  “I saw him go out on the dunes while ago.”

  “I’ll go find him.” Dolly turns and bumps into May who is carrying Jerry, the cat. “Will you take my suitcase up for me, sweetie? Any room.”


  “Sure. Here, Aunt Mariel.” May hands her Jerry.

  May heads up the stairs and Dolly goes on out the door. For a moment, Mariel stands holding the cat, watching her tall graceful daughter run across the yard. “And hello to you, too, Dolly,” she murmurs.

  “Have you ever noticed how much she looks like me?” asks Sarah Sullivan’s shadow. “And Artie, of course.”

  Mariel sighs and goes back to the kitchen.

  He looks old, Dolly thinks, walking up the path toward her father.

  He turns at that moment to see Dolly. She kneels beside him and holds him.

  “I’ve counted fifteen barges,” he says.

  “Hello, Papa.” Dolly smells the warmth of his skin, the shaving lotion.

  “Traffic through here gets worse every year. There was a jubilee last night. Did you know that?”

  “I heard.”

  Then they are silent, looking out at the bay.

  EIGHT

  Tomato Sandwiches

  ON THE DAY THE STOCK MARKET CRASHED IN 1929, THOMAS Sullivan sat on the dune at Harlow, right where his son and granddaughter are sitting almost sixty years later, and watched his very pregnant wife, Sarah, waddle down the beach. Later, he would remember how happy he was on this day, how the sun was pleasantly warm, and how everything seemed to be golden, even Sarah in her yellow dress, bending awkwardly to examine something at the edge of the water. Sarah, sensing his interest, had looked up and waved. It was a picture he would carry with him the rest of his life, Sarah at the water’s edge, one hand raised, the other resting on her huge stomach. Our child, he had thought, and literally felt his heart skip a beat. In two weeks he would know it was two children, a boy and a girl. And he would have learned about the stock market crash, how, as he sat in the sun, desperate men were jumping from buildings, their legacy financial chaos.

  But for Thomas Sullivan, this October day was most memorable because it was the day they signed the final papers on the house at Harlow. Then they drove back to their apartment in Mobile, and Sarah fixed tomato sandwiches and iced tea and brought them to the screened porch.

  “The house is perfect,” she said. “That view, Thomas. Just think about it.”

  “We probably should have put in another bathroom.”

  Sarah put her hands over her ears. “Not one negative word about my house.”

  Thomas smiled. “I promise.”

  It was a day that would go down in the history books. The twins, entwined that day in Sarah’s womb, would study it. So would their children and grandchildren. But Thomas would remember the day for goldenrod lining the shell road that led to the house, and Sarah looking up to wave, her blonde hair catching the sun, her hand pressed against her huge belly. It was a memory so magical, he kept it to himself. His gift.

  NINE

  Peach Cobbler

  “PUSSY-WHIPPED,” REESE WHITLEY MUTTERS. “ALL THE MEN IN this family pussy-whipped.” He is running the vacuum over the already clean living room rug at Mariel’s insistence, pausing every few minutes to wipe his nose on his shirtsleeve. He has been crying all day. Reese is so black, he is only visible when he moves into the late afternoon sunlight that strips the room.

  Dolly loves Reese; she loves the mystery of Reese. For no one can remember when he became a member of the family. He wasn’t there, and then he was, an integral part of Artie’s life. At seven each morning, his ’54 Studebaker rattles into the yard and the day begins. In the late afternoon, he rattles back to Harlow and Irene who towers over him and may or may not be his wife. No one knows how old Reese is or where he came from. His entire life is a mystery.

  Donnie wonders if the United States government knows Reese Whitley exists. Artie says how can it not know; she’s paid his Social Security twenty years. Who knows? When she first got sick, she wanted Reese to be given power of attorney, but Donnie reminded her that Reese was illiterate.

  “Why’d you tell him that?” she asked Reese.

  “Simplifies things,” was his answer. Made sense to Artie who had walked outside twenty years ago, found Reese planting pansies, and never questioned her good luck.

  “But where did he come from?” Even seven-year-old Dolly had wanted to know.

  “Heaven.”

  The answer delighted Reese who was listening as usual. Now he sits on Artie’s mother’s Queen Anne chair and pushes the vacuum back and forth.

  “Nobody knows de trouble I seen.

  Nobody knows but Jesus.”

  Reese sings loudly and mournfully over the whine of the vacuum. He learned years ago the power of a Negro spiritual on the white conscience.

  “I’ll finish this, Reese. You go on home.” Mrs. Randolph takes the vacuum. He goes out the back door. May, sitting on the steps, trying to comb an unwilling Jerry, the cat, with a flea comb, looks up and smiles.

  “You going home, Reese?”

  Reese wipes his nose on his sleeve. “Soon as I get drunk enough, May.”

  Hektor, upstairs in his old room, is learning that vodka and Valium will make you dream in color. He is amazed at this and intends to make a note of it when he wakes up.

  He dreams he is on the pier and the sun is glinting on all the fish scales sloughed from the day’s catch. His mother and father come hand-in-hand toward him. His father has on a blue seersucker suit and white shoes. His mother has on a pale blue dress with a white collar.

  Hektor says, “You look beautiful as Easter eggs.”

  They seem pleased.

  “As beautiful as words?” his mother asks.

  “Of course.”

  “Both Easter eggs and words have to be handled carefully,” Sarah says. “Refrigerated or they’ll make you sick.”

  “Your mother and I are going for a sail,” Thomas says.

  “Please don’t do that. This might be the day.”

  “Don’t be silly,” his mother says. “The sun is shining.”

  “Remember,” his father says, “it’s the search, not the finding. And the joy of the search.”

  “What do you mean?” But they are in the boat out on the bay.

  “What do you mean?” Hektor screams. “And why are you so dressed up?”

  “For my funeral,” Artie says.

  Awakened by May and told he is needed downstairs, Hektor still feels caught in the dream. A low red sun turns the living room golden. Across from him, seated on the sofa, his parents and Artie listen to Mr. Brock. Hektor closes his eyes.

  “I can’t believe it,” his father says.

  “Well, here it is in her own handwriting. I was afraid you might not know.”

  Know what? Hektor smoothes May’s hair. She is sitting on the floor, her head against his knee. Know what?

  “We can’t do it, of course,” his mother says.

  Do what? His fingers slowly follow the ridge where May’s soft spot had been. He remembers seeing her pulse beating there. So fast it scared him.

  “Hektor!”

  “Ma’am?”

  “For God’s sake, Hektor. Wake up!” Mariel’s voice has the shrillness of exhaustion in it.

  “I’m sorry,” Hektor says politely. Mariel begins to cry. Dolly pats her shoulder.

  “Well, it was Miss Sullivan’s wish. She was very specific about it. She wanted her ashes sprinkled in the bay.” Mr. Brock leans back in the Queen Anne chair. “Though that may not be legal. I really haven’t run into this before.”

  Her ashes? Hektor’s fingers tighten on May’s scalp. Artie wanted to be cremated?

  “My mother is right. We can’t do it,” Dolly says.

  Cremated? Hektor clears his throat and agrees. “Of course not.”

  “Well, legally I guess you don’t have to, but it says right here,” Mr. Brock pushes his glasses up on his nose and reads, “ ‘I request that my brother Adonis have my body cremated and that he broadcast my ashes onto the waters of Mobile Bay on the day he deems perfect.’ ”

  “But that doesn’t make a grain of sense,” Mariel says, wiping her nose o
n a Kleenex. “Donnie and I have already picked out the casket, and I’ve already sent her yellow linen dress to the funeral parlor and told them we’d have viewing and the rosary tomorrow night and the funeral the next morning. Ordered the flowers.”

  “She wanted me to do what?” It’s the first time Donnie has spoken.

  “Have her cremated,” Mr. Brock says again.

  “No. The rest of it.”

  “Here.” Mr. Brock hands Donnie the paper. Donnie takes it to the window and reads it. The room is quiet except for Mariel’s sniffling and the hum of the air conditioner. The sun touches the water.

  Mr. Brock glances at his watch. He needs to get back to Mobile to feed his wife her supper. He is the only one she will eat for, opening her mouth like a little bird while he spoons in custard or pureed vegetables. “Don’t leave me,” he says, pushing food in until it runs down the sides of her mouth. “Don’t leave me.”

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t get here earlier today,” he says, running his hand across his bald head, watching Donnie.

  “It would have helped,” Mariel says.

  “My wife is very ill.”

  No one says anything.

  “She’s dying.”

  “I’m sorry,” Dolly says.

  Hektor sighs. Death. There is entirely too much of it. More all the time.

  “I handled your grandparents’ estate,” Mr. Brock says to Dolly. “Got everything worked out without a hitch.”

  “That’s nice.”

  The sun falls rapidly into the water. From the kitchen they hear voices, Mrs. Randolph and Kelly Stuart.

  Donnie, looking at the sun, is thinking he should have known Artie would want cremation.

  “Here, write it down,” Mrs. Randolph says. “It’ll work for any fruit, but peaches are best. You got to use butter, though. That’s the secret. And a hot oven.”

  Donnie turns from the window. “We’ll do what she wants.” There is a collective sigh.