Me and My Baby View the Eclipse

  “What’s going on?” asked Ben, from up the bank.

  Harold took off his own shirt as fast as he could and handed it over to Cherry Oxendine. “Cover yourself,” he said.

  “Why, thank you.” Cherry didn’t bat an eye. She took his shirt and put it on, tying it stylishly at the waist. Harold couldn’t believe it. Close up, Cherry was a lot smaller than she looked on the stage or the football field. She looked up at Harold through her dripping hair and gave him her crooked grin.

  “Thanks, hey?” she said.

  And then she was gone, vanished into the mist and trees before Harold could say another word. He opened his mouth and closed it. Mist obscured his view. From the other side of the lake he could hear “Ramblin’ Rose” playing on somebody’s radio. He heard a girl’s high-pitched giggle, a boy’s whooping laugh.

  “What’s going on?” asked Ben.

  “Nothing,” Harold said. It was the first time he had ever lied to Ben. Harold never told anybody what had happened that night, not ever. He felt that it was up to him to protect Cherry Oxendine’s honor. Later, much later, when he and Cherry were lovers, he was astonished to learn that she couldn’t remember any of this, not who she was with or what had happened or what she was doing in the lake like that with her top off, or Harold giving her his shirt. “I think that was sweet, though,” Cherry told him.

  When Harold and Ben finally got home that night at nine or ten o’clock, Harold’s mother was frantic. “You’ve been drinking,” she shrilled at him under the hanging porch light. “And where’s your shirt?” It was a new madras shirt which Harold had gotten for graduation. Now Harold’s mother is out at the Hillandale Rest Home. Ben died in Vietnam, and Cherry is drowning. This time, and Harold knows it now, he can’t help her.

  * * *

  Oh, Cherry! Would she have been so wild if she hadn’t been so cute? And what if her parents had been younger when she was born—normal-age parents—couldn’t they have controlled her better? As it was, the Oxendines were sober, solid people living in a farmhouse out near the county line, and Cherry lit up their lives like a rocket. Her dad, Martin “Buddy” Oxendine, went to sleep in his chair every night right after supper, woke back up for the eleven o’clock news, and then went to bed for good. Buddy was an elder in the Baptist church. Cherry’s mom, Gladys Oxendine, made drapes for people. She assumed she would never have children at all because of her spastic colitis. Gladys and Buddy had started raising cockapoos when they gave up on children. Imagine Gladys’s surprise, then, to find herself pregnant at thirty-eight, when she was already old! They say she didn’t even know it when she went to the doctor. She thought she had a tumor.

  But then she got so excited, that old farm woman, when Dr. Grimwood told her what was what, and she wouldn’t even consider an abortion when he mentioned the chances of a mongoloid. People didn’t use to have babies so old then as they do now, so Gladys Oxendine’s pregnancy was the talk of the county. Neighbors crocheted little jackets and made receiving blankets. Buddy built a baby room onto the house and made a cradle by hand. During the last two months of the pregnancy, when Gladys had to stay in bed because of toxemia, people brought over casseroles and boiled custard, everything good. Gladys’s pregnancy was the only time in her whole life that she was ever pretty, and she loved it, and she loved the attention, neighbors in and out of the house. When the baby was finally born on November 1, 1944, no parents were ever more ready than Gladys and Buddy Oxendine. And the baby was everything they hoped for too, which is not usually the case—the prettiest baby in the world, a baby like a little flower.

  They named her Doris Christine which is who she was until eighth grade, when she made junior varsity cheerleader and announced that she was changing her name to Cherry. Cherry! Even her parents had to admit it suited her better than Doris Christine. As a little girl, Doris Christine was redheaded, bouncy, and busy—she was always into something, usually something you’d never thought to tell her not to do. She started talking early and never shut up. Her old dad, old Buddy Oxendine, was so crazy about Doris Christine that he took her everywhere with him in his red pickup truck. You got used to seeing the two of them, Buddy and his curly-headed little daughter, riding the country roads together, going to the seed-and-feed together, sharing a shake at the Dairy Queen. Gladys made all of Doris Christine’s clothes, the most beautiful little dresses in the world, with hand-smocking and French seams. They gave Doris Christine everything they could think of—what she asked for, what she didn’t. “That child is going to get spoiled,” people started to say. And of course she did get spoiled, she couldn’t have helped that, but she was never spoiled rotten as so many are. She stayed sweet in spite of it all.

  Then along about ninth grade, soon after she changed her name to Cherry and got interested in boys, things changed between Cherry and the old Oxendines. Stuff happened. Instead of being the light of their lives, Cherry became the bane of their existence, the curse of their old age. She wanted to wear makeup, she wanted to have car dates. You can’t blame her—she was old enough, sixteen. Everybody else did it. But you can’t blame Gladys and Buddy either—they were old people by then, all worn out. They were not up to such a daughter. Cherry sneaked out. She wrecked a car. She ran away to Pensacola with a soldier. Finally, Gladys and Buddy just gave up. When Cherry eloped with the disc jockey, Don Westall, right after graduation, they threw up their hands. They did not do a thing about it. They had done the best they could, and everybody knew it. They went back to raising cockapoos.

  Cherry, living up in Nashville, Tennessee, had a baby, Stan, the one that’s in his twenties now. Cherry sent baby pictures back to Gladys and Buddy, and wrote that she was going to be a singer. Six years later, she came home. She said nothing against Don Westall, who was still a disc jockey on WKIX, Nashville. You could hear him on the radio every night after ten P.M. Cherry said the breakup was all her fault. She said she had made some mistakes, but she didn’t say what they were. She was thin and noble. Her kid was cute. She did not go back out to the farm then. She rented an apartment over the hardware store, down by the river, and got a job downtown working in Ginger’s Boutique. After a year or so, she started acting more like herself again, although not quite like herself, she had grown up somehow in Nashville, and quit being spoiled. She put Stan, her kid, first. And if she did run around a little bit, or if she was the life of the party sometimes out at the country club, so what? Stan didn’t want for a thing. By then the Oxendines were failing and she had to take care of them too, she had to drive her daddy up to Grenada for dialysis twice a week. It was not an easy life for Cherry, but if it ever got her down, you couldn’t tell it. She was still cute. When her daddy finally died and left her a little money, everybody was real glad. Oh now, they said, Cherry Oxendine can quit working so hard and put her mama in a home or something and have a decent life. She can go on a cruise. But then along came Ed Palladino, and the rest is history.

  Cherry Oxendine was left with no husband, no money, a little girl, and a mean old mama to take care of. At least by this time Stan was in the Navy. Cherry never complained, though. She moved back out to the farm. When Ginger retired from business and closed her boutique, Cherry got another job, as a receptionist at Wallace, Wallace and Peebles. This was her undoing. Because Lamar Peebles had just moved back to town with his family, to join his father’s firm. Lamar had two little girls. He had been married to a tobacco heiress since college. All this time he had run around on her. He was not on the up-and-up. And when he encountered redheaded Cherry Oxendine again after the passage of so many years, all those old fireworks went off again. They got to be a scandal, then a disgrace. Lamar said he was going to marry her, and Cherry believed him. After six months of it, Mrs. Lamar Peebles checked herself into a mental hospital in Silver Hill, Connecticut. First, she called her lawyers.

  And then it was all over, not even a year after it began. Mr. and Mrs. Lamar Peebles were reconciled and moved to
Winston-Salem, North Carolina, her hometown. Cherry Oxendine lost her job at Wallace, Wallace and Peebles, and was reduced to working in the deli at Food Lion. Why did she do it? Why did she lose all the goodwill she’d built up in this community over so many years? It is because she doesn’t know how to look out for Number One. Her own daughter, Tammy Lynn Palladino, is aware of this.

  “You have got a fatal flaw, Mama,” Tammy said after learning about fatal flaws in English class. “You believe everything everybody tells you.”

  Still, Tammy loves her mother. Sometimes she writes her mother’s whole name, Cherry Oxendine Westall Palladino Stikes, over and over in her Blue Horse notebook. Tammy Lynn will never be half the woman her mother is, and she’s so smart she knows it. She gets a kick out of her mother’s wild ideas.

  “When you get too old to be cute, honey, you get to be eccentric,” Cherry told Tammy one time. It’s the truest thing she ever said.

  It seems to Tammy that the main thing about her mother is, Cherry always has to have something going on. If it isn’t a man it’s something else, such as having her palm read by that woman over in French Camp, or astrology, or the grapefruit diet. Cherry believes in the Bermuda Triangle, Bigfoot, Atlantis, and ghosts. It kills her that she’s not psychic. The UFO Club was just the latest in a long string of interests although it has lasted the longest, starting back before Cherry’s marriage to Harold Stikes. And then Cherry got cancer, and she kind of forgot about it. But Tammy still remembers the night her mama first got so turned on to UFOs.

  * * *

  Rhonda Ramey, Cherry’s best friend, joined the UFO Club first. Rhonda and Cherry are a lot alike, although it’s hard to see this at first. While Cherry is short and peppy, Rhonda is tall, thin, and listless. She looks like Cher. Rhonda doesn’t have any children. She’s crazy about her husband, Bill, but he’s a workaholic who runs a string of video rental stores all over northern Mississippi, so he’s gone a lot, and Rhonda gets bored. She works out at the spa, but it isn’t enough. Maybe this is why she got so interested when the UFO landed at a farm outside her mother’s hometown of Como. It was first spotted by sixteen-year-old Donnie Johnson just at sunset, as he was finishing his chores on his parents’ farm. He heard a loud rumbling sound “in the direction of the hog house,” it said in the paper. Looking up, he suddenly saw a “brilliantly lit mushroom-shaped object” hovering about two feet above the ground, with a shaft of white light below and glowing all over with an intensely bright multicolored light, “like the light of a welder’s arc.”

  Donnie said it sounded like a jet. He was temporarily blinded and paralyzed. He fell down on the ground. When he came back to his senses again, it was gone. Donnie staggered into the kitchen where his parents, Durel, fifty-four, and Erma, forty-nine, were eating supper, and told them what had happened. They all ran back outside to the field, where they found four large imprints and four small imprints in the muddy ground, and a nearby clump of sage grass on fire. The hogs were acting funny, bunching up, looking dazed. Immediately, Durel jumped in his truck and went to get the sheriff, who came right back with two deputies. All in all, six people viewed the site while the bush continued to burn, and who knows how many people—half of Como—saw the imprints the next day. Rhonda saw them too. She drove out to the Johnson farm with her mother, as soon as she heard about it.

  It was a close encounter of the second kind, according to Civil Air Patrol head Glenn Raines, who appeared on TV to discuss it, because the UFO “interacted with its surroundings in a significant way.” A close encounter of the first kind is simply a close-range sighting, while a close encounter of the third kind is something like the most famous example, of Betty and Barney Hill of Exeter, New Hampshire, who were actually kidnapped by a UFO while they were driving along on a trip. Betty and Barney Hill were taken aboard the alien ship and given physical exams by intelligent humanoid beings. Two hours and thirty-five minutes were missing from their trip, and afterward, Betty had to be treated for acute anxiety. Glenn Raines, wearing his brown Civil Air Patrol uniform, said all this on TV.

  His appearance, plus what had happened at the Johnson farm, sparked a rash of sightings all across Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas for the next two years. Metal disk-like objects were seen, and luminous objects appearing as lights at night. In Levelland, Texas, fifteen people called the police to report an egg-shaped UFO appearing over State Road 1173. Overall, the UFOs seemed to show a preference for soybean fields and teenage girl viewers. But a pretty good photograph of a UFO flying over the Gulf was taken by a retired man from Pascagoula, so you can’t generalize. Clubs sprang up all over the place. The one that Rhonda and Cherry went to had seventeen members and met once a month at the junior high school.

  Tammy recalls exactly how her mama and Rhonda acted the night they came home from Cherry’s first meeting. Cherry’s eyes sparkled in her face like Brenda Starr’s eyes in the comics. She started right in telling Tammy all about it, beginning with the Johnsons from Como and Betty and Barney Hill.

  Tammy was not impressed. “I don’t believe it,” she said. She was president of the Science Club at the junior high school.

  “You are the most irritating child!” Cherry said. “What don’t you believe?”

  “Well, any of it,” Tammy said then. “All of it,” and this has remained her attitude ever since.

  “Listen, honey, Jimmy Carter saw one,” Cherry said triumphantly. “In nineteen seventy-one, at the Executive Mansion in Georgia. He turned in an official report on it.”

  “How come nobody knows about it, then?” Tammy asked. She was a tough customer.

  “Because the government covered it up!” said Rhonda, just dying to tell this part. “People see UFOs all the time, it’s common knowledge, they are trying to make contact with us right now, honey, but the government doesn’t want the average citizen to know about it. There’s a big cover-up going on.”

  “It’s just like Watergate.” Cherry opened a beer and handed it over to Rhonda.

  “That’s right,” Rhonda said, “and every time there’s a major incident, you know what happens? These men from the government show up at your front door dressed all in black. After they get through with you, you’ll wish you never heard the word ‘saucer.’ You turn pale and get real sick. You can’t get anything to stay on your stomach.”

  Tammy cracked up. But Rhonda and Cherry went on and on. They had official-looking gray notebooks to log their sightings in. At their meetings, they reported these sightings to each other, and studied up on the subject in general. Somebody in the club was responsible for the educational part of each meeting, and somebody else brought the refreshments.

  Tammy Lynn learned to keep her mouth shut. It was less embarrassing than belly dancing; she had a friend whose mother took belly dancing at the YMCA. Tammy did not tell her mama about all the rational explanations for UFOs that she found in the school library. They included: (1) hoaxes; (2) natural phenomena, such as fungus causing the so-called fairy rings sometimes found after a landing; (3) real airplanes flying off course; and Tammy’s favorite, (4) the Fata Morgana, described as a “rare and beautiful type of mirage, constantly changing, the result of unstable layers of warm and cold air. The Fata Morgana takes its name from fairy lore and is said to evoke in the viewer a profound sense of longing,” the book went on to say. Tammy’s biology teacher, Mr. Owens, said he thought that the weather patterns in Mississippi might be especially conducive to this phenomenon. But Tammy kept her mouth shut. And after a while, when nobody in the UFO Club saw anything, its membership declined sharply. Then her mama met Harold Stikes, then Harold Stikes left his wife and children and moved out to the farm with them, and sometimes Cherry forgot to attend the meetings, she was so happy with Harold Stikes.

  Tammy couldn’t see why, initially. In her opinion, Harold Stikes was about as interesting as a telephone pole. “But he’s so nice!” Cherry tried to explain it to Tammy Lynn. Finally Tamm
y decided that there is nothing in the world that makes somebody as attractive as if they really love you. And Harold Stikes really did love her mama, there was no question. That old man—what a crazy old Romeo! Why, he proposed to Cherry when she was still in the hospital after she had her breast removed (this was back when they thought that was it, that the doctors had gotten it all).

  “Listen, Cherry,” he said solemnly, gripping a dozen red roses. “I want you to marry me.”

  “What?” Cherry said. She was still groggy.

  “I want you to marry me,” Harold said. He knelt down heavily beside her bed.

  “Harold! Get up from there!” Cherry said. “Somebody will see you.”

  “Say yes,” said Harold.

  “I just had my breast removed.”

  “Say yes,” he said again.

  “Yes, yes, yes!” Cherry said.

  And as soon as she got out of the hospital, they were married out in the orchard, on a beautiful April day, by Lew Uggams, a JP from out of town. They couldn’t find a local preacher to do it. The sky was bright blue, not a cloud in sight. Nobody was invited except Stan, Tammy, Rhonda and Bill, and Cherry’s mother, who wore her dress inside out. Cherry wore a new pink lace dress, the color of cherry blossoms. Tough little Tammy cried and cried. It’s the most beautiful wedding she’s ever seen, and now she’s completely devoted to Harold Stikes.

  * * *

  So Tammy leaves the lights on for Harold when she finally goes to bed that night. She tried to wait up for him, but she has to go to school in the morning, she’s got a chemistry test. Her mamaw is sound asleep in the little added-on baby room that Buddy Oxendine built for Cherry. Gladys acts like a baby now, a spoiled baby at that. The only thing she’ll drink is Sprite out of a can. She talks mean. She doesn’t like anything in the world except George and Tammy, the two remaining cockapoos.