I was so happy with what I bought, I drove over to On The Border, which was not far from the store where I bought my goods, and ordered myself a Mexican lunch, one of the cheaper specials. Except for the Dairy Bob, and a cup of coffee and maybe some pie at the local café, it was rare I ever ate out. It was rare the family ate out.
It came pretty quick, and while I was eating an enchilada I realized I was also eating out tonight and that Mexican food might swell me up in my dress like a sausage. I ended up eating just a little bit, and having the rest boxed up. I knew that once it went into the refrigerator at home, I’d probably never see it again. Either Elbert or Frank or Grandma would pounce on it like a duck on a June bug.
I paid up and went home.
(18)
I was dressed at seven-forty-five, and rushed out to the car to head for the Dairy Bob.
Of course, Elbert, who seemed to be constantly camped outside, saw me coming out. It was still light out, the way it is that time of year in East Texas, so I got a good look at him, and he got a good look at me.
“You look nice,” he said. “Probably too nice for the likes of whoever.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I think.”
I drove to the Dairy Bob, and when I got there I parked out back, the way me and Herb had arranged, and waited. After a few minutes I decided he had stood me up.
I looked at my watch. It was eight on the dot. Okay. Impatient much?
Right at that moment, Herb pulled up in his very nice and expensive red convertible beside me. The car looked as bright and shiny as a saucer fresh-licked by a cat. His car made me feel as if I was sitting in a donkey cart and the donkey was dead. I got out and walked over. Herb stepped out, went around and opened the door for me.
The only time anyone opened the door ahead of me like that was my brother Frank, who was pushing to get past me.
“Thank you,” I said. “But you don’t need to do that. I can open the door.”
“Call it a gesture of politeness, this being a first date,” Herb said.
“So,” I said, as I got in, “on the second date you were planning to drop this part of the action anyway?”
“Pretty much,” he said, and grinned at me. “Man, you look terrific.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I didn’t know if I was overdressing or underdressing.”
“You are dressed for anything. Do you have a curfew?”
I didn’t, but I wanted to play it safe. I said, “Midnight.”
“Okay,” he said. “I thought we could go to the Gabardine.”
“That’s a nice place,” I said.
“For this small town, yeah,” he said, and that made me realize that Herb knew a lot more about life, good restaurants and bad, than I did. I knew without him saying it that he had spent summers in Europe.
“Or,” he said, “we can go to the movies, have a hot dog and popcorn.”
“Nope. I have a nice dress on. I’m all up for a nice place.”
The Gabardine is the only truly nice restaurant in our town. It’s on the side opposite of the Dairy Bob, and where I live. It’s on the side where there are no trailers and no cars up on blocks and no overturned washing machines in the yard. It’s on the side of town where women get their nails done by other people, and not with just an emery board and nail polish. It’s the side of town where people have time to do things besides work. It’s the side of town that smells like money. It’s the kind of place that made me wish I’d worn high heels. It’s on a tall hill that over looks the highway. Herb drove us up there and opened my door and helped me out.
Herb gave the key to a man in a red jacket, and the man drove the car away. I had seen valet service in the movies, but never in real life.
Inside there were glass fish tanks. They were full of bright, swimming fish. A man greeted Herb by name, directed us to a table by a window that looked out over a pond made of rocks and colored cement. There were stripped and spotted fish in the pond.
“You had reservations?” I said, as Herb held out my chair for me to sit. “You knew I’d come here?”
“I have a standing reservation,” he said. “If I come, they find me a table. If I don’t, then, no problem. That sounded kind of elitist, didn’t it?”
“A little.”
“My parents own part of the restaurant. They are investors with the Gabardines. And, for the record the Gabardines are my grandparents on my mother’s side.”
“Oh,” I said.
I looked at the menu. The cheapest thing on it was the price of one whole side of the Dairy Bob menu, counting the waitress’s wages and a tip, maybe the insurance on the building. I looked around for something cheap, and then thought, what the heck. His folks own part of the restaurant, and I am on a date, and he wants to impress me, and I want a steak.
When the waiter came, I ordered a filet mignon with all the trimmings. Herb didn’t blink an eye. Even so, I felt kind of guilty. Maybe I’d skip dessert.
I didn’t, though. I had a slice of chocolate cake that was so rich in chocolate and sugar it made my head swim like those fish in the aquarium. I was glad I had skipped eating all the Mexican food earlier. I hoped after eating I didn’t look too porky in my little black dress.
When we finished, Herb ordered coffee. It was rich and tasty and the cream in it was real, not out of a little package you had to peel open yourself. I had never had coffee that good. Frankly, I had never had a meal that good. My mother was a mediocre cook, and my grandmother thought warming up a TV dinner was really putting on the dog. I didn’t like to think a steak, a cake, and a cup of coffee could impress me that much, but it did.
Herb sipped his coffee, smiled at me. If you could bottle that smile you’d be a millionaire.
“So,” Herb said, “where exactly do you live?”
I hesitated, but came out with it anyway. “In a trailer on the other side of town, out in Judge Park.”
“I don’t know where that is,” he said.
“I’m not surprised,” I said. “There’s no reason for you to know.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means you have money. You have a very different life… Ah, heck. I’m starting to turn this into something I didn’t mean to.”
“No, that’s all right,” he said, reaching out and touching my hand briefly. “I want to know.”
“If you have money, you have no reason to know about my side of town. I live with my mother, my grandmother, and my little brother. Recently, there’s also my sister and her two kids, and I shouldn’t fail to mention I have an uncle who lives on the yard in a van.”
“The yard?”
“He just showed up one day. None of us had ever seen him before. I might add I didn’t list my father in that group. He went out for a pack of cigarettes a few years ago, and didn’t come back. Your turn.”
“Boring. I live on Frank Street. It’s—”
“I know where it is,” I said. “Point I was making. I know where you live. Know the name of the street, but who the hell has heard of Judge Park unless you live there? Sorry. I was asking about you.”
He grinned at me. “You have a lot to say.”
“Sorry.”
“No. I like it.”
“You do?”
“Sure,” he said. “All the girls I know are very proper.”
“Oh, thanks.”
“That’s not what I meant,” he said. “I meant you speak your mind. You have opinions. I don’t know which ones I agree with yet, but at least you have them. In answer to your question, my mother has a nice dress shop in Tyler. My father has an office downtown. He really doesn’t do much, and he doesn’t go there often. But he has a title. My mother runs the shop at a loss as a hobby. My father plays a lot of golf. They have investments, like this restaurant. Nothing exciting. But they’re okay. They’ve done all right by me. They didn’t choose to be boring, and they didn’t plan on being rich. They inherited a lot of money. Like I said, boring.”
“You’re compla
ining?” I said.
“No. I’m just saying it lacks challenges.”
“Sounds nice,” I said. “But challenges can be highly overrated. At least you don’t get up every day wondering if there will be what the electric and water company like to call an interruption in service. When my dad left, I inherited a few comic books and some empty cigarette wrappers and fifty-two cents he left in an ash tray. And you want to know the worst part?”
“What?”
“The comics he left, none of them are that good. And I’ve long ago spent the fifty-two cents.”
(19)
Oddly, I hadn’t noticed how beautiful the night really was. Not in a long while. I always seemed to be darting through it, from trailer to car, from car to the Dairy Bob. But after we came out of the restaurant, I looked up. Sometimes there’s too much light in town to see the sky well, but here in the parking lot, perhaps designed to be more romantic, there were fewer lights and the night was clear. The sky was a soft black stretch of forever with endless diamonds thrown against it, winking down at us. The air was sweet as honey.
When we were in the car, Herb said, “It’s a nice night. Want to take a drive?”
“Sure,” I said. “A drive sounds nice.”
He drove us through town, out past the Dairy Bob, along the highway, and past the city limits. I don’t know what I was feeling then, not really. Knowing only I was in the car with a handsome young man and that we were away from prying eyes, and that it was a beautiful night, and I was full of a lovely dinner. Things got even better when Herb lowered the top on the convertible and my hair lifted in the wind. I had spent some time brushing it and shaping it, and there was part of me that didn’t like all that work to go to waste, but the other part of me loved the idea of the wind in my hair.
The houses fell away and the trees sprang up and the highway climbed. There aren’t a lot of truly high places in East Texas, and a big hill to us is a mountain. I recognized the area we were approaching as we came closer to it, and my throat tightened like someone had glued its sides together.
It was Outlander’s Drop. I don’t know how it came by that name, but that was what it was called by older folks thereabouts, but the kids called it Lover’s Drop, a place between Marvel Creek and not a place not too far away called Camp Rapture.
We pulled off the highway and down a little dirt road toward the edge of Outlander’s Drop. It was mostly clear up there, so it wasn’t like it was in the deep forests. There was only one lightning split tree up on the hill, and we pulled up in front of that split and parked. When Herb cut the engines the inside lights on the dash went black. It seemed as if all the world had gone silent.
I thought of something my sister, Raylynn had told me. About how this was where it had happened. Where her first boyfriend and her had made her first child. In that moment, looking through that lightning split tree, the stars I could see no longer were lovely, but were more like cheap costume jewelry tossed on a dark and dirty sheet.
“Pretty, isn’t it?” Herb said.
I started to say something, but the words got fat in my mouth and I couldn’t get them out.
Herb reached over and touched my hand on the seat between us. He took hold of it gently. I felt something in my stomach move around and then I jerked my hand away, opened the car door and got out. I held the door open, like that mattered. With the top down it was easy to talk to him.
“Go home, Herb. It isn’t going to happen.”
“What?”
“You aren’t going to get what you think you were. You may have money, and I may be white trash, but don’t think that makes you so special I’ll just fold for you.”
“What?”
“You said that,” I said, and closed the door. I walked over and stood on the edge of the Drop. It was pretty high. It went down at a slant. Below I could see brush in the moonlight, and when a thin cloud rolled over the moon, it changed the light down there and the brush seemed to move. It made a chill run up my back.
Herb was out of the car. He came up beside me. He said, “I don’t know what you thought, but—”
“Save it for someone stupid,” I said, and started walking.
I went around the car and down the road as fast as I could go in my nice new shoes, feeling silly as a cartoon character in my little black dress. The dreams in my head were coming apart like cotton candy.
“Dot,” Herb said. “Come back. Come get in the car. We can leave.”
I kept walking.
I walked along the road and thought it was sure a long ways. I was going to be able to make it into town about the time I turned thirty-five.
Herb pulled up beside me, driving slowly. “Come on, Dot. I didn’t mean to offend you. I just took your hand.”
“Yeah, but my hand is attached to the rest of me,” I said as I walked.
“I don’t know what you thought, but you’re wrong.”
I kept walking. He kept cruising beside me.
“I didn’t mean to offend you in any kind of way,” he said. “Hand holding isn’t exactly criminal. Did you hate my touching your hand all that much?”
The gravel on the road crunched as the car glided alongside me.
“I liked it too much,” I said. “I didn’t want to get too deep in the dream, and more importantly, I don’t want two kids and a run away father, and me living in a trailer with dirty diapers, wearing a muumuu.”
“A what?”
“Never mind.”
“Dot, at least get in the car and let me take you home. It’s at least ten miles into town.”
I kept walking, wanting to make a point. But after a few more steps I thought ten miles was indeed pretty far.
I quit walking. Herb stopped the car.
“I won’t touch your hand,” he said, “or any other part of your anatomy. We can discuss politics. We can talk about the rising prices of farm-raised chicken. I don’t care. I won’t leave you out here by yourself. I’ll drive alongside you all the way home if I have to.”
I got in the car.
I guess we drove for five minutes without speaking. I glanced at Herb out of the corner of my eye. He looked like his insides had collapsed.
I said, “I’m sorry.”
“What?”
“I said I’m sorry. Don’t make me say it again.”
“I’m not making you say it at all,” he said.
“I… It’s hard to explain.”
“I think we have a little time if you’d like to try,” he said.
“I don’t want to.”
“So I’m just going to have this mystery?”
I was silent for awhile before I spoke. “I read more into that than you meant. Or maybe I read into it what I meant. I like you. I’m attracted to you. I felt like if I didn’t get out of the car right then I might go where I shouldn’t.”
“I wasn’t trying to—” He paused. “Well, I guess it could lead to that. That’s natural.”
“Yeah, and we both know what that means,” I said.
“It’s not a bad thing unto itself…I think we’re talking about the same thing.”
“No, it isn’t,” I said. “And yes, we are talking about the same thing… You meant sex, right?”
“Yep.”
“Okay,” I said. “Just checking. It’s the timing that’s bad. My sister could tell you a little about timing. This thing we’re talking about has to mean more than a good dinner and a nice drive under the stars.”
“I just wanted to hold your hand and talk,” Herb said. “I think I might have wanted a kiss too. That part could have waited until I took you home.”
“I overreacted,” I said. “I felt like a hole had opened up under me and I was falling in. It may not be an excuse for how I acted, but my sister has two kids, and neither by Immaculate Conception. Two fathers, two kids, and they both are out of the picture, and one of them I beat with a two-by-four. I know I’ve told you this, but there it is again.”
“Not the two-by-four pa
rt,” he said.
“We’ll save that for later,” I said. “And I’ll just say again my father ran off and didn’t even leave us with a pack of chewing gum. Not a word since.”
“You had mentioned that before,” Herb said, “but the chewing gum part is new. You ever think maybe something happened to him.”
“Now and then,” I said. “All I know is I want something better. You follow me?”
“I do. I get it. But I still don’t think holding your hand is going to cause you to wear a muumuu.”
“Hand holding has its repercussions, you know.”
He smiled. “Friends?”
“Sure,” I said. We drove on, and long before we got back to town, and the lights became too bright, and everything turned too familiar, and oh so real, for a long, good moment the stars once again looked nice up there and the wind was sweet as honey.
(20)
He didn’t take me straight to my car, and that’s because I asked him not to. When I did that, he looked at me sideways, but didn’t argue. He said, “Where to?”
I told him I wanted coffee, and I wanted it in the coffee shop where I had gone to wait on Raylynn.
There was hardly anyone there, just an older guy at a back booth with a cup of coffee, reading a newspaper.
Herb ordered coffee and pie. I ordered coffee. I wanted the pie, but after that cake I had I held back. Not only for the waistline, but because I thought it might have been making me loopy. Sweets do that to me. I had treated Herb like he was a rapist, rather than a young man with normal appetites. Actually, it was my own appetites I was afraid of. And I didn’t just mean a craving for pie.
We talked, and Herb said, “You seem to think poor people are less happy than rich people.”
“Did I say that?”
“No,” he said. “But you implied it.”
“Well, I think being unhappy with money might be better than being unhappy without it.”
“Unhappy is pretty much unhappy,” Herb said. “Even if you can afford to feel bad in a nice car and a house with an ocean view you still feel bad.”