Black-Eyed Susans (9 page)

“Zarf,” I say automatically.

“Well, you’re the damn exception
to a damn lot of things.” She wanders from the black granite bar that divides the
tiny kitchen from the living room and surveys the industrial Bernina sewing machine on
the dining room table, draped like a bride in white tulle. “What’s this
week’s project? Something else for one of those damn rich ladies?”

I kick the refrigerator door shut.
“For one of those damn rich ladies’ little girls. A tutu. For competition.
Tulle underpinning, lavender appliqué. Swarovski crystals.”

“Fancy-pantsy. I bet she’s
paying you a fortune.”

In fact, she isn’t paying me a
fortune, because it’s a sad fact that most damn rich ladies no longer appreciate
the cost of things made by exacting, artful hands. Not when everything can be purchased
from China with the click of a mouse.

“It’s a little side job,”
I say. “The costume designer for a Boston ballet company has asked me to dress the
leads for its spring production. I want to make sure I know what I’m doing before
I say yes.”

“They’d be lucky to have you.
You’re getting quite global. I thought you were leaving this week to design a
staircase for that crazy actor fellow in California, the one who farts through his
movies. Doesn’t he want it made out of an old Camaro or some damn thing? And
wasn’t Charlie’s soldier daddy flying in to stay with her while you were
gone? The one who promised to patch that spot on my roof. What’s his name?
Lucifer?”

“Lucas. That California job’s on
hold for now.” No explanation, because my past is never discussed. Effie knows
about that part of me, or she doesn’t. I have no idea and want to keep it like
that. Either way, it isn’t
important
to her.

I can always tell by the way someone looks
at me the first time,
like I’m a distressing piece of modern art.
As an added piece of luck for me, Effie had mostly cut the newspaper out of her life
because it made her think the world was “going to damn hell in a damn rocket
ship.”

That didn’t mean she canceled her
subscription. During the four years we’d lived in this house, she had dropped
The New York Times
on our stoop with random regularity, unread, minus the
puzzle. No iPad crosswords for Effie, despite Charlie’s best efforts. Effie was
certain the device was controlling her, instead of the other way around.

I nudge her over to the couch. “Sit.
What’s the problem?”

“Aren’t you going to open the
card on those flowers? What’s the occasion? Belated birthday?” Her eyes are
lit with curiosity.

“No occasion I’m aware of. Did
you say you saw who left them?” I drop the question as casually as I can. Flowers
always punched a little panic button, because anyone who liked me well enough to send
them, wouldn’t.

“Cute fellow in a Lilybud’s
Florist outfit. His shorts hung off his bottom. Gave me an eyeful.”

Effie could have seen that bottom today. Or
yesterday. Or a month ago.
Time
is a dull, pleasant river for Miss Effie.

I tap her on the shoulder; I’d need to
pick up Charlie from volleyball practice soon and she would be craving something besides
bulgur-infused banana bread. “So what’s the problem?” I repeat.
“Shoot.”

“There’s a digger
snatcher.” She waves a small garden trowel, which I hadn’t noticed until
now. “I’m going to take it up with the neighborhood watch.”

“Digger … snatcher?”

“I just drove to Walmart to buy this
one—$2.99 plus tax. Been going on for six months. I buy a digger, and it
disappears. I can’t keep buying diggers. Do you know where your digger is?
I’m thinking of taking a block digger survey.”

“Um.” I have to think about
whether I want to answer. “Behind
the house. I think I left it
there when I was … doing a little weeding.” Stuck upright in the ground,
like a grave marker.

“I’m warning you, you might as
well be leaving out a crisp $100 bill.”

“I’ll keep an eye out. Do you
have a place … you regularly put your digger?” I ask this cautiously,
knowing that organization is a sensitive topic for Effie.

Things in her house have a way of dancing
around: a
Scientific American
on genetic engineering stashed in the freezer,
the extra house key taped to the bottom of the butter dish, a bottle of Stoli vodka
crammed under the bathroom sink with the rusty can of Comet from 1972.

“Well, back to sorting my
seedpods.” Effie stands. “The grubs ate my beans something terrible last
year. I’m going to try putting out a bowl of beer for them this year. I’m
sure that’s pure bunk but it seems like a happier way to go than me stomping their
guts out. I wouldn’t mind drowning in a bowl of beer when it’s my
time.”

I laugh. Reach over and give her a hug.
“Thanks for making my life … normal,” I say.

“Honey, I’m a sweaty
mess.” She meekly returns my hug. “Most people think I’m pretty
weird.”
Most people
generally meant her daughter.

“Well, I can relate. What kind of
person builds staircases for farting actors?”
What kind of person suppresses
the flutter in her chest every time the sun goes behind a cloud, afraid she’s
going blind? Or when she opens a jar of peanut butter? When someone yells
“Susan!” across a playground?

On her way to the door, Effie pauses.
“Can you send Charlie over in about a half-hour to help me and my hysterical
society lady friend move some stuff? I mean, historical. Although she
is
a bit
hysterical. These ladies need to get their heads out of their damn bustles, if you get
my drift.”

“Of course.” I grin.
“I’ll tell Charlie.”

From the stoop, I watch her
navigate across the thick carpet of golden brown Bermuda, disappearing into her
overgrown front garden until all that’s visible is her hat bobbing like a bluebird
above a mound of fountain grass.

For sixty-one years, Effie has occupied the
frilly yellow house next door, a Queen Anne cottage that, like our 1920s Arts and Crafts
bungalow, sits in the middle of Fort Worth’s famous historical Fairmount District.
Effie can’t remember the exact number of paint colors she’s slapped on her
spindlework and fish scale shingles over time, but she dates things by saying,
When
the house was lilac,
or
When the house was in its awful brown period.
Effie still pulls her Cadillac boat out of the garage to attend the neighborhood monthly
historic preservation meeting. She revels in dragging Charlie, one eyeball at a time,
away from her iPhone and assaulting her with neighborhood history. The trolley once
rumbled down our street, which is why it is wider than most of the others. Over on
Hemphill, there used to be a fantastical mansion with a life-size windmill on top, until
it mysteriously burned to the ground.

When the phone inevitably reasserts its
magnetic force on Charlie, Effie just brings out the hard stuff: tales about Butch
Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, who lived in Hell’s Half Acre only three miles from
here, or the creepy, boarded-up pig tunnels that run under the city. “That’s
how Judas goats got their name,” Effie asserts. “By herding pigs to
slaughter to spare themselves. Back when, goats herded as many as ten thousand pigs a
day through Fort Worth’s underground tunnels to their miserable fates in the
Stockyards. Like New Yorkers in the subway.”

Generally, when it came down to Effie vs.
Twitter, Effie won. “Kids need a sense of place,” she liked to admonish me.
“A sense that they all aren’t living and talking in outer space.”

Back in the kitchen, I firmly root myself in
the uncomfortable present, on the one kitchen stool that obediently twirls little
half-circles. I sip my tea and stare at the card on the flowers. It begs to be opened. I
reach over, tug it off its plastic holder, lift the tiny flap, and
pull out a flat cardboard square decorated with a cartoon spray of balloons.

I miss you.

Love, Lydia

The card slips from my hand onto the
counter. The corner begins melting into the ring of sweat left by my iced-tea glass.
Lydia’s name blurs into a purple stain. Not the handwriting I remembered, but
maybe it isn’t hers. Maybe it is the florist’s.

Why would Lydia casually send me flowers?
Wouldn’t she understand that I’m still in mortal daily combat with them?
That I’m hanging on to the bitter shreds of our fight after the trial? We
hadn’t talked for seventeen years, since her family up and left without a word.
The flowers seem like a taunt.

I yank the arrangement out of the vase,
splashing my jeans in the process, and slide open the glass door to the back yard.
Within seconds, pink Gerbers and purple orchids are scattered on top of the funeral pyre
of my compost. I carry the vase to the recycling bin sitting empty outside the two-car
garage that backs up along our fence line. Bemoan that Charlie should have taken in the
recycling bin two days ago.

No reason to panic and think my monster sent
these and signed Lydia’s name. I open the gate to the slim ribbon of grass that is
our side yard. SpongeBob’s squeaky voice wafts from an open window next door. That
means the babysitter is inside, not the fussy lawyer parents with matching Tesla
sedans.

I learned a long time ago to pay attention
to what is usual, and what is not.

To retrieve an encyclopedia from the
smallest sound.

I round the corner. No one has planted any
more black-eyed Susans under my bedroom windowsill. The ground is smoothed flat and
swirled, like a pan of chocolate cake batter. The thing is, I hadn’t done any
smoothing or swirling.

And my digger is gone.

“If you had three wishes, what would
they be?” he repeats.

His latest game.

The curtain had gotten us nowhere last time.
I had no clue why I was drawing it. I had told him that it was an ordinary curtain.
Still, like there was no breeze. When I didn’t bring in my drawings today, he
didn’t bring it up. He noted my boundaries, unlike the others, but he’s
irritating me in whole new ways. For instance, now insisting I show up for his little
interrogations twice a week.

“Really?” I ask. “Let me
see. Do you want me to say that I wish my mother would come down from her puffy cloud
and give me a hug? That I wish I wasn’t living in some kind of Edgar Allan Poe
poem? That I wish my three-year-old cousin would stop snapping his fingers in my face to
see if he can magically make me see? That I wish my father would yell at the TV again? I
need a whole lot more wishes than three. How about this: I wish I weren’t
answering this stupid question.
”

“Why do you want your father to yell
at the TV?” A trace of amusement in his voice. I relax a little. He isn’t
mad.

“It was his favorite thing. Yelling at
Bobby Witt when he makes one of his wild throws. Or walks somebody. Now Dad just sits
there like a zombie when the Rangers play.”

“And do you think
that’s your fault?”

The answer to this is too freakin’
obvious.

I wish I’d never met Roosevelt, so I wouldn’t have needed to buy a
Snickers bar, so I wouldn’t have been walking out of that drugstore at 8:03
P
.
M
. on June 21, 1994. I wish I never cared about winning, winning, winning.

“It’s interesting that you bring
up Poe.” Already moving on.

I’d bite on that one.
“Why?”

“Because most people on that couch
who’ve endured a psychic trauma compare their experiences to something in more
current pop culture. Horror movies. Crime shows. I get a lot of Stephen King. And John
Paul. When did you start reading Poe?”

I shrug. “After my grandfather died. I
inherited a lot of his books. My best friend and I got into them for a while. We read
Moby-Dick
that summer, too. So don’t go there, OK? It doesn’t
mean anything. I was a happy person before this happened. Don’t focus on things
that don’t mean anything.”

“Poe was mired in his lifelong fear of
premature burial,” he persists. “The reanimation of the dead. His mother
died when he was young. Don’t you think that could be more than
coincidence?”

A hammer is pounding my brain.
How did
he know?
Just when I thought he was an idiot, he surprised me. He was always
going somewhere.

“Do you want to tell me about
it?” he asks.

Oscar picks that moment to readjust himself.
He licks my bare knee on the way back down. Aunt Hilda yells at him idiotically all the
time, “No lick! No LICK!” but I love his slobber. And right now, it is like
he is saying,
Go ahead, take a chance with this one. I want you to throw the Frisbee
to me someday.

“The college girl from East Texas
… Merry or Meredith or whatever.” I speak haltingly. “She was alive
when they dumped us in that grave. She
talked
to me. I remember her both ways.
Dead and alive.” With eyes like blue diamonds and with eyes like cloudy sea glass.
Maggots hanging out in the corners, twitchy pieces of rice.

He doesn’t answer
immediately. I realize this is not at all what he was expecting.

“And the police have told you
that’s not possible,” he says slowly. “That she was already dead when
you were in that grave. That she’d likely been dead for hours before you were
dumped.”

How carefully my doctor had read everything
about this case.

“Yes. But she was
alive
in
the field. She was nice. I could feel her breath in my face. She sang. And she was in
the church choir, remember?” Begging him to believe me, and I am only telling him
the least crazy part. “She told me her mother’s name. She told me all of
their mothers’ names.”

I wish I remembered them.

I am waiting for the morning bomb to go off.
Or not. I have made coffee and buttered a piece of bulgur-banana bread, listened to
Charlie blast music in the shower, loosely sketched an appliqué design for the
tutu, thought about how lucky I am.