But maybe it did. Florence was getting to me a little. She always could. I thought of my uncle Bruster, with his wispy blond tufts combed over his bald spot, his big belly, his broad sloping shoulders. Bruster looked like what would happen if the bear got over on the mountain and they had a baby. He had the Lukey blue eyes, large and powder blue and a little moist-looking, and when I was eleven, he had been my date to the Possett First Baptist Father-Daughter Pancake Brunch. Clarice had been on his other arm, but he had pulled out my chair for me and called me Little Lady all morning.
I heard my closet door squeak open, and then a pause that Florence filled with alternating sentiment and invective. The closet door shut, and Burr came back in the room toting the Computer City bag with my new laptop in it. He pantomimed a whistle, looking impressed, but I didn’t believe it. Something else was going on in his head as he stared down at the laptop in its bag. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking.
Burr was a good lawyer and an even better poker player. He and I used to play a card game we made up called Five-Card Minor Sexual Favor Stud, but I quit for two reasons. One, it led us too far down a path that could only end in frustration and a whomping great fight. And two, he almost always won.
Burr sat back down and put the bag on the coffee table. He picked up his book again, but he wasn’t reading, and he wouldn’t meet my eyes.
Eventually, against all odds, Aunt Florence got to the part where she told me she would be praying to God, asking Him to help me not be such a selfish little turd. Then she let me get off the phone. I gave her a vague promise about taking a hard look at my summer course schedule and seeing if I could squeeze in a trip home sometime before fall. Aunt Florence’s final skeptical snort was still ringing in my ears as I hung up.
“That’s a speedy machine,” Burr said casually, indicating the bag. “You really are broke.”
“Yup,” I said. I had cleaned myself out to buy it. In fact, I bought it to clean myself out.
“Lucky I’m not,” said Burr.
“Very lucky, since you’re taking me to dinner,” I said. I got up, but Burr stayed wedged down in the sofa.
“That’s not what I meant,” he said. “Lena, remember I said I wanted to talk to you about something at dinner?”
“Yes?” I said, and all at once the flutter was back. I was standing up, already looking down at him. I was wondering if there was room between the sofa and the coffee table for him to slide down onto one knee, or if I should move out from behind the coffee table to give him space.
“I think I better ask you now,” he said, and his dark eyes were very serious. Burr had nice eyes, but they were small and square. I never noticed how sweet they were until I got close enough to kiss him. His face wasn’t about his eyes. It was about his cheekbones and his sharply narrow jaw, severe enough to contrast with his wide, soft mouth, with the gorgeous teeth his mama paid eight thousand dollars to straighten. “I’m a little nervous.”
“You don’t have to be nervous,” I said, but I was nervous as all hell.
“Take your aunt Florence out of the equation, and your mama. Take everything out of the equation but you and me. If I said it was important to me, would you take the trip down to Alabama for this party next week?” Burr asked.
I sat down again abruptly. “What?” I said.
“I can pay for the trip.”
“I can’t let you pay for me to go down and see my family,” I said.
“I wouldn’t be,” he said. “I would be paying for both of us to make the trip.”
“I can’t let you do that, either,” I said.
“Can’t or won’t?” he said. He was smiling, but I could read him now, and underneath the smile he was angry.
“Won’t,” I agreed. There is a big, fat downside to never telling a lie.
“Don’t worry,” Burr said, gesturing at the laptop, still smiling his beautiful, angry smile. “Computer City has a ten-day no-questions return policy.” He stood up and stalked around the coffee table away from me. “Because obviously you have no intention of keeping this thing.”
“No, of course not,” I agreed. And immediately the words “There are gods in Alabama” rolled through my head so powerfully that I thought I was going to say them aloud, but Burr stopped them by speaking again.
“Lena, if you won’t take me down and introduce me to your family, we’re coming to a dead end.”
“But I love you,” I said. It came out flat and wrong, though I was remembering how it was with us when we made out on the sofa in the late nights when Burr came over after I’d studied myself sick. I was thinking of how we were together when his huge hands were on me, and we both knew the rules.
His hands were so big, Burr could practically span my waist with them. And he had a jet-rocket metabolism, so his skin was always liquid hot to the touch. His big hands would slide over my body, slipping up or down into forbidden zones. As he touched me, I could see in my mind the flex of the muscles, how the dim light would reflect on the shifting planes of his hands as they moved on me. And I could take my hand and push that big hand away, down off my breasts, onto my waist. Guide it so slowly out from between my legs onto my thigh. His hands always went where mine told them to go, immediately, no matter what. The power of that, the ability or maybe the permission to move something so much stronger than me, left me light-headed and feeling something I couldn’t name, but it was close kin to longing. Eventually I would have to shove him away, push him out the door with hasty little kisses, both of us dying of wanting to and not, both of us laughing.
Burr said, “You say that a lot.” He was standing by the front door, looking at a point somewhere just over my left shoulder. He sometimes did that when he was ticked off, carry on a fight while peering moodily off at the horizon, as brooding and ugly-beautiful as Heathcliff thinking, “Oh! The moors! The moors!”
I said, “If I didn’t love you, I wouldn’t say it at all. You know I don’t lie.”
“There are a lot of things you say you don’t do, Lena,” he answered. “You don’t lie, and you don’t fuck, and you don’t take your boyfriend home to meet your family. You say you love me, but you have a hundred ways to avoid the truth without ever lying.” He pointed at the laptop on the table. “Case in point. Today you tell your aunt that you’re broke, and tomorrow you return that and get your money back. And that’s what you call telling the truth.”
“No, it’s what I call not lying. There is a difference, you know. I am not under any obligation to tell anyone everything. I just don’t lie, which is more than ninety percent of the freakin’ world can say, and anyway, why are we having this fight? Why did you this minute decide I need to take you to my uncle’s retirement party? That’s not what I thought you were going to ask me.”
Burr said, “Maybe it’s not what I planned to ask you, either. But Lena, I watched you work your aunt over, and I found myself wondering—not for the first time—how often you work me, to keep me out of the middle of your life.”
“First of all, Possett, Alabama, is not the middle of my life. It is not my home. It’s the fourth rack of hell. I don’t go there myself, let alone want to take you—”
“Look at your phone bill,” Burr said.
“And second of all,” I went on as if he had not spoken, “I don’t see the connection between not having sex with you and taking you to Alabama.”
“It’s what women do when they fall in love with a man,” Burr said. “They have sex with him, or they take him home to meet their family. In point of fact, Lena, most women do both.”
“But my family is insane,” I said in what I hoped was a reasonable tone. “Why would you want to meet them?”
“Because they’re yours,” he said matter-of-factly, one hand reaching for the doorknob. “I thought you were mine.”
I was instantly furious. It was too good a line, a movie line. People don’t get to say smashing things and then walk out in real life. Burr could say crap like that more often than most becau
se of his low-slung basso profundo voice. He could say hyper-dramatic lines that, if I said them, would have whole crowds rolling on the floor, shrieking with laughter and telling me to get over myself. But Burr? He could say “Luke, I am your father,” and get away with it.
But not with me.
“Don’t you dare try to Rhett Butler your way out the door in the middle of a fight,” I said, getting up and coming around the coffee table after him.
He let go of the doorknob and said, “You’ve never so much as mentioned my name to your folks, but you spend half your free time at my mama’s house. You won’t be my lover, but you can’t keep your hands off me until I’m clinically insane. I’m a twenty-nine-year-old man, Lena. Not some fifteen-year-old kid who says he loves you in the hopes of seeing his first tit.”
I said, “It isn’t that I don’t love you. But I swear before God, you don’t want to make this trip. It would be like stepping into a soap opera, except no one is beautiful or rich or interesting. If we went down there, you have to know what it would be like. I mean, come on, Burr, what do you see when you look at us?”
Burr said, “I always saw the best couple going. The question is, what do you see?”
“Same thing,” I said. “But that is not what they are going to see down in Possett, Alabama. They’ll look at me and see that weird Arlene Fleet who was never any better than she should be, and when they look at you, they’ll see that nigger she’s fucking.”
Burr smiled a little and said, “But I’m not fucking you.”
“Well, we could maybe get you a T-shirt that says you aren’t, but they wouldn’t believe it, because why else would I be with you? It can’t be that you’re smart, or handsome, or interesting, or successful, because you can’t be any of those things when you’re in Possett, Alabama. You will be much too busy being black. When you’re with my family, being black is such a big job, it takes up your entire definition. You don’t get to be anything else.
“If I show up home, wanting to bring my black boyfriend to my uncle Bruster’s good-ol’-boy retirement party, they’re going to take that as personal. Like I got a black boyfriend specifically to use as spit for their soup.
“And maybe then you’ll get it in your thick man head that I picked you because you’re black and that’s a button I can push. I mean, a girl doesn’t go home for ten years, you have to guess she has some issues with her family. But that’s not why at all. I picked you because you’re you, and you’re perfect for me, and because I’m so in love with you.”
Burr said, “I love you, too, Lena. But I’m done being played.”
I said, “What does that mean? You’re giving me an ultimatum? ‘Fuck me or lose me’? Because that sucks, Burr.”
“Don’t misunderstand me,” he said, his voice rising. “Don’t make this about me trying to get over on you. I’ve never pressured you that way. And yeah, obviously I want to have sex with you, but that’s not what I’m saying here. I’m asking you to introduce me to your family. That’s all. I’m asking for a commitment, Lena. We’ve been together two years now.”
“On and off,” I said.
“Mostly on.”
He reached for the doorknob again, and I said, “Don’t you dare walk out on me in the middle of a fight.” I was so angry, I was practically screaming. “I mean it, don’t you do it.” He paused for a second, but then he flipped the dead bolt.
The door seemed to catch in the frame, so he gave it an angry shove. It swung open, knocking back a girl who was standing on the other side. She was so close she must have had her ear pressed up against the wood, and the force of Burr’s exit spilled her all the way backwards onto her bottom.
“What the—” said Burr, and he stepped over the threshold towards her, already reaching down to help her up. She went scuttling backwards like a panicked crab. He stopped moving, and she bounced back to her feet, scrabbling frantically in her huge macramé purse. She was dressed like one of my students, in tight jeans and a peasant blouse, but I didn’t recognize her. Her hand came out of her purse and up, holding a tiny spray can aimed at Burr’s face.
“I heard you yelling,” she said to me. She was breathing hard, but once on her feet, she seemed more exhilarated than frightened, taking a theatrical Charlie’s Angels pose with the spray can.
“Whoa,” Burr said. He put his hands up. “Calm down.”
She didn’t take her eyes off him, but she was talking to me. “You go for the soft parts,” she said. “And then we run while he’s down.”
I realized I had put my hands up, too, instinctively. I dropped them and walked over beside Burr. “Are you all right?” I said to her. “It was an accident. We didn’t know you were there. What on earth were you doing?”
“Lena, is this one of your students?” said Burr. He angled himself, trying to stay between me and the Mace, which was easy since she had it pointed aggressively at his face. She had her legs apart in a fighter’s stance, and both her arms were fully extended, aiming the can like a gun.
“I don’t think she’s after me, Burr,” I said, and because I was so angry, I couldn’t help but be amused, watching this tiny girl hold him at bay. “Her problem’s with you, looks like.”
“I was just leaving,” said Burr.
“Bet your ass you are,” the girl said.
“He was only trying to help you up,” I said to her, but she ignored me and kept the can trained on Burr.
Burr dropped his hands slowly and walked past her, and she turned in a circle, keeping him covered.
“We’re not done with this conversation,” I called after him.
“I am,” he said and went on down the stairs.
I started after him, but the girl turned sideways and then stepped to block me. She whipped her head back and forth, trying to keep an eye on both of us.
“Excuse me,” I said, but she ignored me. Burr turned the corner, and the moment he was out of sight, she faced me and dropped her arms, grinning triumphantly. “They’re almost all sonsabitches.”
At second glance, she was too old to be one of my students. I put her at about thirty. She was my size or maybe even a little shorter. I doubted she could claim five-one in bare feet. Her thick dark hair was cut in an aggressive bob, shorter in the back and angling down into two razor-sharp points on either side of her fiercely pretty face.
“We were only arguing,” I said. “Excuse me, I need to catch him.” I started after Burr, but she moved into my path, blocking me again. She still clutched the spray can.
She said, “If I had a dime for every time I said those words!”
“Put the Mace away,” I said.
“Oh, right.” She dropped it into her bag. “What timing, huh? I heard you yelling in there, and I was about to bust this door down and come in after you.”
She said the word “you” as if it had a W on the end. It was pure Alabama. I forgot about going after Burr and stared at her, taking in her pointy face and the huge violet-blue eyes gazing out from between the sharp wings of her hair.
“Rose?” I said, but it simply couldn’t be. The last time I’d seen Rose Mae Lolley, she’d had waist-length hair and had moved with the slow grace of an underwater ballerina on opium. The Rose Mae I knew and loathed years ago, back in Alabama, would never go leaping around wielding Mace in a Yankee stairwell. And she certainly wouldn’t lower herself to speak to me.
But she was nodding and saying, “Can you believe it? I look different, huh? You don’t. Not much, anyway. I mean, older, sure. But I knew in a glance I’d found Arlene Fleet. May I come in?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. I thought for one absurd moment that she had to be here on a mission from Aunt Flo, a tactical maneuver in the perpetual war to bring me home. Before I could stop myself, I found myself asking, “Who sent you? Was it Florence?”
Rose looked puzzled and said, “Florence? Oh! Mrs. Lukey? Clarice’s mom? Lord, no, I haven’t seen her in a dog’s age. How is she doing?”
I boggled at he
r. “This isn’t some sort of old-home week, Rose. I haven’t seen you in ten years. I didn’t even know if you were alive or dead, and quite frankly, I didn’t much care. And now you are standing out in my stairwell, apparently eavesdropping on me and my boyfriend? It’s none of your business how my family is. If Aunt Florence didn’t send you as some form of torture, then how the hell did you even find me? What are you doing here? What do you want from me?”
She briefly looked nonplussed, but then she plastered a smile on her face and said, “Okay, Arlene. I guess you never were one for social graces. That’s fine. It’s kind of a long story, but if you want the short, standing-in-a-stairwell version, I can do that. I got in a fight with my therapist, and now I’m on a spiritual journey. Congratulations, you’re my next stop.”
I looked at her skeptically. “Is this about the retirement party?”
“No, I don’t even know what that means. Surprisingly, everything in the world isn’t all about you, Arlene. This is about me. I told you, I am trying to follow a path I’ve devised for my own spiritual development—”
I held up my hand to stop her talking and said, “If this is some sort of twelve-step thing, making amends or whatever, fine. I forgive you. Now I need to go catch Burr.”
“Forgive me for what?” said Rose. We did a little three-step dance in the hallway as I tried to get around her, and she bounced back and forth from foot to foot, hair swinging, to stop me. “Wait, Arlene, one minute. I’m sorry I sounded snippy. I really do need your help. I’m only doing what you’re trying to do. Going after the one that got away.”
I stopped trying to get around her and eyed her warily. You can take the girl out of Alabama, but how do you stop Alabama from following you over a thousand miles to lay siege to your doorstep? I felt the beginnings of an old anger stirring; God was not supposed to let this happen. It was an unspoken part of the deal. I took a step back towards my open apartment door. “Whatever this is, it can’t have anything to do with me,” I said.
“But it does, indirectly. See, my therapist said I get crappy men because I go looking for them, not because men are mostly crappy.” I took another step back, and she started talking faster, trying to make me hear her out. “She thinks I choose assholes because that’s what I think I deserve, blah blah, masochism, blah blah, low self-esteem. You know how shrinks talk.”