Club Storyville (4 page)

I had read tales of the Roaring 20s, but it was hard to believe I had been around during those years of plenty. Just shy of seven when the stock market crashed, the only life I could remember had been careful spending and rations. I had grown accustomed to the fact we would always have more than most people, but never excess, that there would always be enough, but never more, and that was exactly how life felt. Everyone just existed, no one thrived. We got by on what we had, and stopped dreaming about what we wanted.

My existence was dishes, and laundry, reading into the nights, helping Mama tend the house, and going to visit Nan’s room, which was the closest I came to escape from monotony. I stopped thinking I might go to college one day when the war was over, that I would get my own apartment in the city and build my own life.

I didn’t think I would ever do more than what I was doing, I didn’t think things were ever going to change, and I didn’t think I was special to anyone, especially not to Ariel. She was so much more than me, this classy, educated, capable creature who could survive North or South on her own, while I was just terrified of losing anyone else, despite the fact I still had Nan and Mama and Daddy right there with me.

Though I thought about Ariel a lot, more than made sense, what she was doing when I didn’t see her, what she was thinking when I did, I couldn’t imagine Ariel thought about me at all, that she would ever hug me when it wasn’t a special occasion or I wasn’t crying, or would ever be as open with me as she was with Scott.

One night in February, though, it was Ariel’s voice that pulled me from deep inside a bad dream. Waking breathlessly in my bedroom, I thought she was part of my sleeping mind, because I had dreamt of Ariel before. In those dreams, we were real friends who touched and laughed together where everyone could see us.

“Ariel?” I said in confusion when I spotted the mirage of the person moving about my room.

“Shhh,” she glanced back at me as she went through my things without asking. “Don’t wake everyone up. I want to show you something. Where are your warm clothes? It’s cold.”

“Where are we going?” I asked a few minutes later, after I had pulled my clothes over my nightgown and Ariel was leading me away from the house by flashlight.

“Just up here,” she replied, and I could barely see her smile in the light that cast upward toward her face. “Okay,” she came at last to a stop, clicking the flashlight off, and, the moon only a sliver above us, it was as dark of a night as night ever got. “Look up.”

Despite her specific instruction, I looked to Ariel first, but I couldn’t see her standing right beside me, so I did as she told me, glancing to the sky to find the same stars that were always there. Wondrous as always, they were no more wondrous, and nothing that wouldn’t be there the next night at nine o’clock, instead of at three o’clock in the morning.

Remembering Ariel had been living downtown, though, and in Boston and Chicago and other big cities before that, it occurred to me the stars over a country sky might be a remarkable thing for her, so I squinted hard, trying to see what she saw that put such excitement in her voice.

It was then that the first light streaked across the sky.

“What was...?” Before I could finish asking, another light streaked overhead, and another, until there was nothing but a blitz of stars, hundreds of wishes waiting to be made to change the course of the world.

“Nan said you used to love to look at the sky,” Ariel whispered as one final light dashed over our heads, leaving a trail to slowly fade away, and, dropping my gaze, I looked for her again in the dark night.

“I do,” I whispered.

“It’s a meteor shower,” Ariel answered the question I never got around to asking. “It’s a really good one.”

It was good. I had never seen anything like it. It had been a long time since I had stared into the stars like that. It had been a long time since I had remembered to look up at the sky at all.

More remarkable than what I had seen, though, was how it felt, knowing Ariel had discovered something I hadn’t told her and had woken me in the middle of the night to show me something I would have otherwise missed.

“You and Nan talk about me?” I questioned, and, for a moment, with no other soul around and winter’s cold holding nature in its quiet clutches, there was the deepest silence I had ever known.

“She talks about all of you,” Ariel returned at last, and it sounded careful, as if she didn’t know how much she should say. “You’re important to her.”

Though it wasn’t the answer I was hoping to hear, I didn’t know what answer I wanted enough to tell the difference, so I decided, for the moment, it was sufficient in meeting my curiosity.

“Is it over?” I asked, eyes going to the sky in search of more of the spectacle when I could still see nothing closer to the ground.

“No,” Ariel responded. “There will be a few more before sunrise. That had to have been the best of it, though. We got lucky.”

I felt lucky. For a moment, with her, I felt like I wasn’t just waiting for the chores to need doing or for the next bad news. It felt like there was life on the ground beneath that endless, mysterious sky, and Ariel and I were living it together.

“Can we stay a while longer?” I questioned, not expecting to see anything better than what we had already seen, but wanting that magical moment, when it felt like I was important to Ariel, to last.

“Yes,” she answered simply, and I could hear the fumbling of the flashlight as she slid it into the pocket of her coat and the brush of fabric against fabric as she crossed her arms against the chill.

“Do you know what I think?” Ariel’s voice came softly out of the night, like a trick of the wind, some moments later.

“What?” I was dying to know what she thought. I had been dying to know for weeks what went on inside Ariel’s head. I was so tired of not knowing.

“I think one day people will reach the stars.” She stated it plainly, as if she wasn’t saying something utterly absurd.

“Do you really?” I questioned.

“They’ve already had rockets reach up there,” she said. “Eventually, it will be people.”

“Do you think anyone will waste money on that?” I couldn’t help but question. It seemed so far-fetched to me that such a thing would ever come to pass when there were financial markets in ruin and a war destroying cities across the ocean. “What would be the use? Wouldn’t it be silly?”

“I don’t think so,” Ariel returned softly. “When this war ends, there will be something else that comes. If the years go on like this, they will be so long and so exhausting, everyone will give up. Humanity can’t go on like that forever. Without hope, Elizabeth...” I could hear the change in Ariel’s voice as she looked toward me, and I wondered if she could see me any better than I could see her. “...we die.”

In that instant, I realized Ariel had been paying attention to me, maybe more attention than anyone else. Tears pressing against my eyes, I reached out for her, like I had wanted to every day for weeks, my hand finding the crook of her arm. Warmer as I pressed against her side, I let her think my eyes were still on the sky as I tried to make out her face in the darkness, far more in awe of Ariel than of the universe.

Chapter Three

A
riel believed in the power of the sun to heal all things, and, as spring started to pop up for a day here and there, she would take Nan out in her wheelchair to sit for some time in the afternoons.

Mama always fussed that sick people shouldn’t be outside in all the germs and unknown, but Ariel would tell her sunlight was good for all measures of darkness, with a glance my way, and take Nan out anyway. I knew Ariel must be right, because Nan looked so much better once winter came to a close and she could meet the rays of the spring sun for a few hours each week, I started to think she might actually get well.

When they would go, Ariel always asked me to come with them, and, though Mama would
tsk
and tell me I was going to ruin my complexion, and no man would want a dark-skinned girl who didn’t have dark skin himself, I was happy to follow Ariel to the garden, where even the flower buds making their early appearances seemed to brighten in her presence.

Once outside, away from the prying ears and the commandment that made me honor my mother and father, there was no one to tell me how to keep myself or to behave. Nan and Ariel talked about all sorts of things ladies didn’t dare talk about - politics and the war and religion – and had disagreements all the time.

Oddly enough, though, when Ariel had questions about the Christian way, Nan didn’t get mad or tell her to go read her Bible like she did most people. She listened, and then, when Ariel was done, she told Ariel what she thought right back, and they would come to a sort of crossroads where Nan seemed to accept Ariel’s questions made sense and Ariel seemed less convinced of her own disbelief.

It wasn’t exactly an impasse. They never got angry, locked horns, or sharpened their words. It was more like a meeting place they had discovered together, where they realized they liked talking to each other so much, they didn’t care that they were trying to prove each other wrong.

“There is surely a Heaven, though,” Ariel made sure to tell Nan every time. “And it will be a better life than this one. That, I believe.”

Nan would smile when Ariel said that, believing the words instinctively, deep down in her very being. Ariel’s smile came slower, though, and I didn’t know if she had any faith at all in what she was saying, or simply didn’t have the heart to tell an old woman at the end of her life there may be nothing beyond it.

I
t was the middle of March when the heat wave rolled into Richmond. Waking that first morning, it was like someone had tossed hot stones on me as I slept, and even Ariel suggested we stay indoors and try to keep ourselves cool.

Nan was insistent, though, that she get her daily time outside, and it was only as I watched her slide the blanket from her lap and lay it over the arm of her wheelchair for the first time since summer that it occurred to me Nan was cold all the time anymore and could appreciate the too-hot day the rest of us cursed for making us uncomfortable.

Under the shade of Nan’s favorite maple, the one that gave the most impressive showing in autumn when its greenery gave way to deep, glossy red, Ariel and I shared the bench next to Nan in her wheelchair. Listening to them talk about President Roosevelt, I was happy to listen to their voices going back and forth, as always. When the details about the New Deal started to sound too much like something I would hear in school, though, I decided it a good time to go inside and bring us all some lemonade to ward off the early push of summer.

“What are they talking about out there?” The heat had no impact on Mama’s nosiness as she paused in picking the dead limbs from the shrubs against the side of the house. Glancing in the direction I came from, her curiosity failed to give her the power to see what was going on past the budding foliage of Nan’s flower garden.

“Sunday’s sermon,” I lied, and Mama gave a sniff of disapproval, because she knew Ariel didn’t like church, even though she went with us every Sunday in case Nan needed her, and she thought that meant Ariel was a damned heathen.

If there was ever a contest to judge true belief in God, though, Nan would beat Mama by a Lord’s mile, and she didn’t seem to think Ariel’s dislike of churches was going to do anything but give God a laugh when Ariel met Him in Heaven and He proved her wrong.

With no way of knowing I was telling her anything but the truth, Mama didn’t have any more questions for me, and I was free to go about my business while she went back to worrying about the business taking place on the other side of Nan’s mountain laurel.

S
tepping around that sprawling shrub a few minutes later, three glasses of lemonade balanced on Nan’s silver tray, the fabric of my shirt clung to my skin and I was certain the air had grown more humid in my absence. When I looked up, though, to see Ariel pull the hem of her shirt free and slip the fabric over her head, it stilled completely, until the atmosphere in the garden was too thick to draw breath.

Ariel’s sleeveless chemise sticking to her chest, her sweat turned it almost see-through, but Ariel didn’t seem worried about modesty as she lifted her hair off her neck with one hand, fanning herself like a fancy lady with the other.

At Nan’s raucous laugh in response, I should have been happy. It had been so long since I’d heard her sound like the Nan I grew up with, so strong and full of life. If I could have focused on it, perhaps I would have been happy. The tray trembling suddenly in my hands, though, I could concentrate on nothing but the cream fabric soaked against Ariel’s chest, the way her neck curved so perfectly into her shoulder, and, feeling suddenly faint, my sole focus was on not breaking anything else over her.

When Ariel finally noticed me standing there, she smiled, and that only made it more pronounced, the feeling that swept through me, leaving me shaken, and, as she twirled her hair onto one shoulder to come nearer with a look of slight concern, I was too unsteady to escape, certain I would destroy something delicate if I tried.

Growing up with two brothers who weren’t nearly as polite as they behaved around adults, and friends in school who weren’t nearly as innocent as they pretended to be, I wasn’t naive. At least, I wasn’t naive enough. I knew what it meant to feel my body respond that way, to be suddenly aware of parts of my body I didn’t usually feel. I just didn’t want it to mean that, knew it couldn’t mean that, that it was wrong.

That I was wrong.

Even knowing I was happier than I had ever been whenever Ariel smiled at me, that I felt more important each time she said my name, that I was elated when I noticed her noticing me, I could explain those things away. I could pretend they were something else, something wholesome that didn’t make me depraved.

The shivers that moved like fingertips down my spine as Ariel stepped closer in her see-through chemise and took the tray from my hands to set it safely on the bench, though, they couldn’t be explained as anything other than what they were.