Chapter 23 #2
“Oh, I know, Birdie, isn’t it awful?” I thought, Eh. But I nodded. She put a hand on my shoulder. “It must be so hard to have to live with that your whole life.”
“Meg is—she’s probably the closest I’ll ever get to having a child of my own,” I said. God, I could be a terrible person when I tried. “But if I could just write to her—a few times—I think it’d be easier to, I don’t know, live.”
Frances was nodding and swallowing and, oh my God, were those tears? For her poor old-maid sister who’d never marry or bear children because she was dry as a bone inside? “I don’t know how you do it, Bird,” she said. “You’re so brave. I can’t promise anything, but I’ll see what I can do.”
At twelve thirty, I buttoned up my new old dress.
It was a tall, narrow glass of burgundy wine with short sleeves and it hit just below my knees.
“That color’s too dark for the middle of the day, especially in August,” Frances said, but this was the dress I wanted to wear, so I was wearing it.
My nerves, rising to a high pitch, were making me too warm already.
In front of the full-length mirror on the back of her door, Frances slipped the crimping combs out.
I cringed. It was too curly now. “I look like the Tates’ poodle, the mean one Meemaw ran over.”
“Just wait,” she said and brushed the curls out with her fingers.
This was probably the most my sister’d touched me since junior high when she’d made me up as a green witch while she was a fairy.
Soon, silky waves fell against my face, and I pushed a lock behind my ears.
“Don’t,” she said and untucked it again.
She rummaged around in a shoebox for a lipstick.
I could feel her own hope rising now, waiting on my banker date.
“Now look, don’t gobble up all the candy he buys you at the picture show.
In fact, tell him you don’t want any, and don’t do the funny thing. Men don’t find it attractive.”
“What am I supposed to do if I don’t do the funny?”
“Let him do the talking. Men prefer that. And don’t ask him inside when he gets here or brings you home, I don’t want him to see the house.
” She put tissue between my lips. “Alright, blot and smack.” With her finger, she rubbed some of the color onto my cheeks and my eyelids.
“And whatever you do, if he gets a flat, don’t change his tire. Now look at yourself.”
She turned me around. The view was definitely better.
The bump in my nose, my chinless chin all looked a little less so with the brown waves around my face.
Even my cheekbones sat a little higher with the greasy dark red hue on them.
“I look a little bit like you,” I said. She smiled, she liked that. But then she shook her head.
“You do look pretty, but not like I am.” I turned to get out of there before she snuffed out the tiny bit of confidence I had.
But she stopped me, studying my hair, my lips.
“What I mean is, you’ve got something else—or you do when you keep your mouth shut.
It’s like …” She tilted her head, narrowed her eyes. “You’re smoldering inside.”
Could she really see that? The slow, hot tinder I’d felt inside me most of my life?
“The magazines say it’s called sex-y.” She raised her eyebrows at the scandalous word. “That’s what you’ve got.”
At three minutes after one, Jack tapped the knocker on the front door.
I opened it and shut it so quick behind me I knocked myself in the rear, nearly bumping into him.
I had on my good short-brimmed straw hat, white gloves, and a pair of Frances’s T-strap heels I’d squeezed into.
He had on a pressed white shirt, no tie, no hat on his downy blond head. He looked like he could breathe.
“You look so nice,” he said, looking over my narrow dark dress, and I knew I’d tried too hard.
His dusty black Model A was nothing fancy, but it had gorgeous brown channeled leather seats that warmed the backs of my thighs—I prayed I wouldn’t start sweating.
Tall as Jack was, he had to shimmy down a little in his seat so his head didn’t hit the roof of the car.
Mounted on the dashboard was a polished chrome grille with two knobs and a line of numbers that ran across it.
A radio set. I’d never seen one in a car before.
But I was trying to follow Frances’s advice, so I kept my mouth shut.
I made it as far as the big oak tree that split the road in two. So about seven seconds.
“Does that thing really work?”
“The radio? Sometimes.” He turned a silver knob, and a shushing wind came out. He turned it off. “I’ll try when we get a little closer to town.”
I’d broken the seal already, so I asked, “You said you’ve been in Oxford about two months, is that right?”
He nodded. “I reckon I’ll be here another six or seven weeks. Then I go back to Jackson.”
“Do you have family there?” I asked. What I really wondered was if he had a girlfriend there.
“I do, I have some family—what about you, what’s happening down in the Delta these days? You said the town you’re from’s called …”
“Footely. And there’s absolutely nothing happening there.
” The Delta was a vast stretch of four and a half million acres of ridiculously fertile farmland.
Since he was from the north Delta, about fifty miles from Oxford, and I was from the south, it did not surprise me that he didn’t know my town. “When did you leave Panola County?”
“When I was seventeen. I jumped on a boxcar headed to Jackson and got my first bank job sweeping the floor.” So he hadn’t grown up like Rory or, I presumed, Mr. Allison.
As he drove us slowly towards town, he said he missed the Delta, the flat quiet land, the sunsets.
The small talk should’ve cut the taut thread of my nerves, but it didn’t.
He didn’t seem nervous at all; he drove with one hand on the top of the leather steering wheel, the other on the seat.
Watching the golden hairs on the back of his hand, I kept my real questions to myself: Who are you, why did you ask me on a date, and why aren’t you married?
And why hadn’t he asked me that question?
Men could easily ask it in a flirty way when really what they wanted to know was, what in the world is wrong with you?
“When do you think you’ll go back home?” he asked.
“I ask myself that every Wednesday at twelve seventeen.” I thought he got my joke. “I can’t leave my sister until things get sorted out.”
“I gathered that about you. You don’t seem like the kind to abandon somebody who needs help.” Then he gave a low laugh. “And I forgot you were funny.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll remind you.” Since I couldn’t keep my mouth shut long enough to be sexy, the funny was all I had.
We talked a little more about how disappointed he was about the term of Mrs. Tartt’s loan.
I was so tired of worrying. It felt like I’d been doing a balancing act, terrified that if I dropped one plate of problems, I’d drop them all.
Jack reached up and turned the radio back on.
“Moon Song” was playing behind the soft scratch of static.
Half a minute later, the road turned to gravel, and we rolled our windows down partway so a breeze could blow in, and I thought, Somebody definitely thought this moment through.
That two people could listen to Wayne King on a hot day with the car windows down.
Immediately, though, I feared I might be liking it all too much, so at the Percy mansion, with the foreclosure signs on the front, I forced myself to remember, That’s what this man does for a living.
And when this date turned out to be nothing, I’d keep reminding myself that he worked for a bank.
Already I was building levees to beat the flood of disappointment.
Just off the square, he parked under the shade of some oak trees. Saturday was farmers market day, and I could see the square was busy. The courthouse lawn was lined with mule wagons selling vegetables and melons. Jack turned the car off and asked, “By the way, what’s Birdie short for?”
“Birdina,” I said. It was an odd name from the dead grandmother, but I was an odd girl. He set his hand on top of mine, and again I felt that jolt of current running up my arm.
“Well, Birdina, today my job is to distract you from everything you’ve been worried about, or at least for the next couple of hours.”
I thanked him and hoped there wasn’t lipstick on my teeth.
This was my first talkie—I’d only been to the silent picture show before in Port Gibson, a half hour of reading words on a screen while a man played a piano. The wide marquee over the Lyric Theater read FAY WRAY IN THE VAM IRE BAT.
“Short on p’s today,” I said, and he smiled. Birdie, the funny friend to all. He slid two dimes through the window, and we went inside, where there was a candy counter stacked with boxes of Sailor Boys, Bob Whites, a row of Co-Colas in paper cups. “Would you—”
“No thank you,” I said, like my instructor’d taught me to do.
A man in a red jacket opened the door to the theater.
The light was a soft, tangible yellow, and it smelled mushroomy and sweet in here, candy crushed into damp carpet.
The theater was over half full already. The usher, looking at Jack’s size, showed us to seats near the back, Jack on the aisle, me second seat in.
I gave the dress a tug so it wouldn’t ride up over my knee when I sat down.
I could feel the heat of the car ride coming off Jack, his broad shoulder pushing against mine.